DR. MICHAEL Newdow, find a young woman by the name of MaryKait Durkee. Maybe she can give you some much needed lessons on what to do about the Pledge of Allegiance.

Durkee was only 15 when, in 1998, she caused a storm of controversy by refusing to stand and say the pledge at a school some 50 miles from San Diego. Durkee said she didn't believe in God, felt the U.S. government was corrupt and her country too violent.

That sounds like the very description of a nation that has lost touch with God, but never mind. Durkee's stand was supported by a 1940s Supreme Court decision that held students couldn't be forced to recite the pledge.

Four years later, Newdow has a problem of a different nature. He has an 8-year-old daughter in public school. Her class says the pledge daily, but she isn't forced to join in. That's not good enough for Newdow, who, like Durkee, is an atheist and a Californian. Newdow - the poor guy - doesn't want his child's ears besmirched by the sound of the other little tykes uttering the phrase "under God."

So he filed a suit which ended up in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appalls - er, uh, Appeals. Two judges ruled last week that the words "under God" in the pledge were unconstitutional, violated the separation of church and state and were a governmental stamp of approval for religion.

Notice the very different methods Durkee and Newdow used to protest the pledge. The schoolgirl chose silence and objected when she felt coerced to recite. She went for the simple solution: If you have a problem with the pledge, don't say it.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the Pledge of Allegiance. It amounts to a loyalty oath, which should be anathema in free societies. Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin might have needed loyalty oaths from their citizens, but we shouldn't.

Then there's that phrase I always trip over: "liberty and justice for all." The pledge was written in 1892, when thugs disguised as Democrats in many Southern states had removed or would remove Reconstruction governments by shooting, murdering and terrorizing their way into power. Nothing like "liberty and justice for all" existed, and anyone writing that it did clearly was beamed in from another planet.

Unlike Newdow, I don't have a problem with Americans who love the pledge and recite it as is. That's the difference between Durkee and Newdow. One simply wanted to exercise her right not to say it. The other wanted to gum up the works for everybody.

It's no accident that, at 49, Newdow is a baby boomer. He's from the generation that has caused much social damage to America, and Newdow seems determined to finish the job single-handedly if he has to.

We were the generation that wanted freedom to "do our thing," which included the wanton drug use that has escalated and nearly brought us to ruin. We advocated "free love," and then wondered why the rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases soared.

We wanted free speech, and boy, did we get it. Profanity and vulgarity are now the norm in film and on television and radio. That precious daughter of Newdow's will hear, as she walks the streets, music blasting from car "booming systems" with lyrics that degrade women and contain the crudest, coarsest language for the description of sex acts.

Those words - and his daughter's exposure to them - didn't prompt Newdow to make a federal case of them. But he simply won't tolerate her hearing that dreadful phrase "under God." There should be neither doubt nor wonder that Newdow's an atheist. Only one who doesn't believe in God could so utterly fail to see how truly blessed he is.

Is exposure to the phrase "under God" truly the major crisis in his little girl's life? There are 8-year-olds in America who don't get enough food. There are those whose parents are drug addicts, who attend schools so awful that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance might be the highlight of their day.

There are children who are the victims of severe sexual, physical and emotional abuse and others who suffer from outright neglect. Just how much sympathy should average Americans - regardless of how they feel about the pledge - have for Newdow's poor baby being exposed to those oppressive words "under God?"

Many baby boomers have learned from our mistakes of the '60s and '70s and have grown up and moved on. Newdow seems stuck in some kind of hippie time warp. But at 49 and with an 8-year-old daughter, it's time the guy stopped playing the radical and got a life.