I Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic?

Students came back to school this week and in the public schools that means I will have to regularly observe the Pledge of Allegiance. Here's the Cato Institute's Gene Healy on the subject:

From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state.

I pledge allegience to my loved ones, and to my God, but not to my government.