Leadership Quote by Judy Biggert

A politician praising the Pledge is never just praising the Pledge; it is declaring which fights are worth having and which identities get to count as “shared.” Judy Biggert’s line is engineered to sound benign - “important expression,” “shared values” - while staking out a hard-edged position: freeze a living civic ritual “in its current form,” and treat any revision as cultural vandalism rather than democratic argument.

The phrase “current form” does a lot of quiet work. It sidesteps the messy reality that the Pledge has been revised before (and politicized every time), and it smuggles in a presumption that the present version is the natural endpoint of patriotism. That’s not history; it’s branding. The insistence on preservation recasts a contested phrase as settled tradition, turning dissent into deviance.

“Urge my colleagues” signals this is as much a loyalty test as a statement of belief. The intended audience isn’t only constituents; it’s fellow lawmakers and the broader political ecosystem that rewards symbolic clarity over substantive policy. In that ecosystem, the Pledge functions like a cultural shorthand: you can imply alignment with a certain vision of nationhood - religious, majoritarian, disciplined - without naming any of those things explicitly.

The subtext is defensive: anxiety about cultural change expressed as reverence for ritual. By invoking “shared values,” the quote invites listeners to feel included, then quietly defines inclusion on the speaker’s terms. That’s the political genius of civic liturgy: it sounds like unity while policing the boundaries of belonging.