More Casualties of California Loyalty Oath Revealed

As noted on How Appealing, Friday's Los Angeles Times provides details about other employees of the California state university system who have been fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath imposed by a 1952 amendment to the California Constitution. The article observes that the oath requirement, adopted as a byproduct of McCarthy era paranoia about Communist subversion of American institutions, now often leads to dilemmas for Jehovah's Witnesses as well as Quakers and other pacifists seeking to work for the state government. California's continued use of the loyalty oath had previously been denounced in a  LA TImes op-ed by eminent First Amendment scholar and University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone.

Originally hired to be a lecturer in the American Studies program at Cal State Fullerton, Wendy Gonaver, a Quaker, lost that position when she refused to sign the oath's pledge to defend the federal and state constitutions against all enemies. Gonaver refused to sign after she was told she could not append a statement to the pledge in an effort to affirm her commitment to pacifism. Prior posts here had reported the firing and eventual reinstatement of Marianne Kearney-Brown at Cal State East Bay. After Kearney-Brown was allowed to attach to the pledge a statement from the California Attorney General's Office that validated that the oath should not be understood to require any employee to take up arms, she signed the oath and was reinstated as a math instructor.

Responding to the Gonaver situation,a representative Cal State system maintained that state law does not allow an employee to draft and file an addendum to the oath and differentiated the declaration Gonaver sought to file from the state AG's Office statement Kearney-Brown submitted with her oath. In a strange inconsistency among the different branches of the California higher education system, UC Berkeley informs new employees that they are allowed to submit statements of belief to accompany the oath and offers employees with reservations about signing sample declarations to submit resolve the oath dilemma. Such sample statements include "This is not a promise to take up arms against my religious beliefs" and "I owe allegiance to Jehovah".  Berkeley became the first California university to require a loyalty oath in 1949 and subsequently fired thirty one faculty members who would not sign.    

If readers of this blog are aware of other state or local governments' current use of such oaths, please let us know about such practices.

JFB