"So the next time you see me sitting down during 'God Bless America,' don’t give me the 'hairy eyeball'..."

"... or say I’m un-American. In our great country, each of us has the right to his or her own religious beliefs, and we celebrate our nation’s diversity and plurality. My deeply held and sincere religious beliefs just don’t countenance this ritual."

From the Wikipedia article on the song:

Music critic Jody Rosen comments that a 1906 Jewish dialect novelty song, "When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band," contains a six-note fragment that is "instantly recognizable as the opening strains of 'God Bless America.'". He interprets this as an example of [Irving] Berlin's "habit of interpolating bits of half-remembered songs into his own numbers....

In 1938, with the rise of Hitler, Berlin, who was Jewish and a first-generation European immigrant, felt it was time to revive it as a "peace song," and it was introduced on an Armistice Day broadcast in 1938, sung by Kate Smith on her radio show. Berlin had made some minor changes...

The original lyric was "Stand beside her and guide her to the right with the light from above."

... by this time, "to the right" might have been considered a call to the political right, so he substituted "through the night" instead.