Washington ? When Michael Newdow urges the Supreme Court today to ban the mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, he’ll be up against not only the Elk Grove (Calif.) Unified School District, where his daughter attends classes, but also the school district’s supporters: the Bush administration, the Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress, dozens of members of both the House and Senate, the governments of all 50 states and the National Education Assn. But the atheist does have one advantage: consistency.

An unabashed proponent of extirpating all religious references from public life, Newdow has no problem standing before the court and urging it to edit “under God” out of the pledge, even if that logic, extended, would probably doom “In God We Trust” on currency and even the cry of “God save the United States and this honorable court,” with which the Supreme Court begins its day.

His opponents, by contrast, must negotiate a minefield of Supreme Court precedents that have interpreted the constitutional prohibition on the official establishment of religion to mean that government must stay neutral among religious beliefs, avoid actions that have the purpose or effect of endorsing any religious belief, and refrain from coercing individual citizens to express a religious belief.

“If you look at the logic of the cases writ large, take their logical principles and try to apply them in the abstract, then Newdow wins, because the pledge seems to endorse religion in some measure,” said Eugene Volokh, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA. “The rationale (for the pledge) is pretty clear — it’s the ‘no extirpation’ rationale. … But the question is, how do you translate that into a legal rule? And the answer is, it’ll be quite a challenge for the court to do.”

Matter of precedence

In 1992, for example, the court ruled 5-4 that a rabbi’s nonsectarian invocation at a public high school graduation ceremony violated the Establishment Clause because nonreligious students might feel psychological pressure to join in, even if they were not formally required to do so.

The San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit cited that case, Lee v. Weisman, in its decision last year banning the recitation of the pledge in the public schools of nine Western states.

Though students have always been free to remain silent during the recitation of the pledge, the 9th Circuit ruled that the mere fact that Newdow’s elementary-school daughter had to stand and listen to “under God” violated his right to instruct her in religious matters without state interference.

The 9th Circuit pointed out that Congress rewrote the pledge in 1954 to include “under God” as a way to contrast the United States with the officially atheist Soviet Union, making it a state-sponsored affirmation of monotheism.

The pledge, Newdow writes in his brief, is “the majority using the machinery of the state to enforce its preferred religious orthodoxy.” Among his supporters are Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Patriotic, not religious?

By contrast, defenders of the pledge’s current wording must explain to the court why it should not apply the principles of cases such as Lee v. Weisman.

Each of the 33 briefs filed in support of the pledge — one by the Elk Grove Unified School District, which is near Sacramento, and 32 by friends of the court — makes that point in a different way. For the most part, the briefs steer in a relatively secular direction, calling the pledge a patriotic exercise, not a religious one.

The reference to God in the pledge is “ceremonial,” Elk Grove argues in its brief, and the pledge “is simply a patriotic expression, that includes a reference to God, which reflects a long standing philosophy of government.”