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Hot diggety!!! FFRF and Newdow sue over "In doG We Trust" on US Money

Here's the complaint:

http://ffrf.org/uploads/legal/IGWTComplaint.pdf

It does a good job of demonstrating the damned motto was put on for religious reasons (present day claims to the contrary notwithstanding), covering the initial inception on our coinage, the controversy when Theodore Roosevelt tried to remove it from some coins in 1907, the addition to paper currency in the 1950s (starting with Series 1957 silver certificates), and the brouhaha when people couldn't find it stamped into the edge of the presidential dollars. It got moved to the face of the coin, but "E Pluribus Unum" and the mint and date got left on the edge.

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Permalink Reply by G on March 13, 2013 at 9:46pm

Nice starting..

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Permalink Reply by E Gross on March 15, 2013 at 8:25am

In case most people don't know, since I spoke with someone who thought "E Pluribus Unum" meant "In God We Trust", it is Latin for "Out of plurality comes unity' - meaning that the USA is supposed to be a pluralistic state, united, with no one side imposing on others.

So while I don't live in the USA, I wouldn't mind such a statement on the money in my wallet.

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Permalink Reply by SteveInCO on March 20, 2013 at 1:15am

E Pluribus Unum does not appear on our paper money at all. It does appear on our coins. It even appeared on our early coinage, from say 1795 to 1840 (silver coins). It hasn't been on every coin historically but it does appear on all of them today.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on March 19, 2013 at 11:01pm

About UG, the two words added to the Pledge, allegedly to announce America's opposition to the Soviet Union's atheism:

An NYT op-ed on January 18 in 2012 told of a forthcoming book One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Rise of the Religious Right by Kevin M. Kruse, an associate professor of history at Princeton.

The op-ed said UG first appeared in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and that it "disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century,..." when "corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit [FDR's] New Deal."

During the 1930s depression, those corporate leaders wanted to "restore their public image and simultaneously roll back the 'creeping socialism' of the welfare state."

They enlisted highly-regarded clergymen to unite faith and free enterprise, to attack the federal government, and to advance "a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics...."

The term evolved to "freedom under God" and in 1951 a business-financed Fourth of July celebration kicked off a campaign to encourage the nation to use that expression to commemorate independence.

In 1953 President Eisenhower presided over the first presidential prayer breakfast on a "government under God" theme.

In 1954, "as this 'under-God consciousness' swept the nation" Congress added "under God" to the Pledge.

It seems fair to say "American capitalism needs all the help it can get".