Loyalty oath leads state to reject volunteer
Pete Peterson pointed out that university jobs are not the only jobs lost over state loyalty oaths; now Illinois has turned away a hurricane shelter volunteer for refusing its loyalty oath.
Jessica Parman wanted to help hurricane victims but didn't see the need to pledge allegiance to her government to do it.
Parman said she was turned away from a hurricane relief center in Chicago last week because she refused to sign an oath presented by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.
Interestingly, as Matthew Belmonte first told me, the idea that disaster relief workers need to owe political allegiance to the government that is co-ordinating their activity is one of the legal rationales for the contemporary California loyalty oath. See Cal. Gov. Code section 3100 et seq.. So from the point of view of California law, maybe disaster relief work is a particularly relevant kind of work to the loyalty oath, rather than a particularly irrelevant kind of work.
Jessica Parman wanted to help people in a shelter hundreds of miles away from an actual disaster. The state refused her help over a loyalty oath. It's hard to see anything but waste in that unless you think that expressions of political allegiance are inherently good and desirable in themselves.
