On Thursday, the Supreme Court decided parents in Cleveland can use public vouchers to send their children to private religious schools. Many may welcome that ruling, if only because courts are meantime staying busy making an ungodly mess of public schools.

Thanks to recent court rulings, Americans today have a constitutional right to access pornography at the public library. But it is unconstitutional, at least in some states, for teachers to lead children in the Pledge of Allegiance at a public school.

No kidding. Just weeks ago, the Supreme Court struck down on free expression grounds a federal law denying federal subsidies to public libraries that refuse to install anti-porn computer filters. Meanwhile, as is much in the news, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled that the Pledge, because of its “under God” language, violates freedom of religion.

The Pledge ruling inspires amazement and outrage and ridicule of the 9th Circuit court as famously flaky. Yet, in a sense, the appeals court is not being treated fairly in all this.

Given the Supreme Court’s rulings in recent years on religious expression in schools, it is not really much of stretch for the 9th Circuit to decide that the Pledge constitutes what the court has deemed an unconstitutional “establishment of religion.”

The high court has ruled, for example, that even student-led prayers at extracurricular activities, such as a football game, are unconstitutional. The court has also let stand lower court rulings that it is unconstitutional for a school district to advise biology students to think for themselves in reconciling the theory of evolution with their religious beliefs.

The Pledge decision is not far out of line with this extreme position that the constitution prohibits any governmental encouragement of a religious view of existence. The Pledge decision, in fact, is useful. It is so easy to understand that it makes clear to millions just how inflexible the courts have become on this matter.

If voluntary recitation of the Pledge is unconstitutional because, as the 9th Circuit put it, a teacher’s “proclaiming that there is a God” will injure atheist students, then great quantities of America’s heritage may be unfit for schoolrooms. Reading aloud the Declaration of Independence would expose nonbelievers to repeated acknowledgements of “Nature’s God” and humankind’s “Creator.”

Hundreds of great speeches from American history are presumably, now, unconstitutional. (Lincoln: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” Humphrey: “We place our faith in the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.” Kennedy: “Here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.” Etc., etc., etc.)

Still, the Pledge decision is notable not because it is weird but because it is reasonably representative of the courts today.