Cal State Instructor Fired for Statement of Pacificism

Since the McCarthy era, teachers in California have been required to sign a loyalty oath before taking their jobs. Wendy Gonaver, a quaker and pacifist, asked to include a statement about her commitment to nonviolence along with her pledge to "defend" the constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." She was summarily fired from her adjuncting position at Cal State Fullerton.

The LA times reports that the effect of the loyalty oath has mostly been to drive members of certain religions, mostly Quakers and Jehovah's witnesses, out of the California school system. The report gives examples of people who refuse to sign the loyalty oath because of because it implies that they must be willing to use violence. A couple months ago, a math instructor was fired from Cal State East Bay for inserting the word "nonviolently" into her loyalty oath. She was rehired after enlisting the help of the UAW. The Times says that other teachers refuse to swear allegiance to anyone but God. The paper gives a couple of examples of Jehovah's Witnesses being fired on these grounds.

This is an installment in our ongoing series about government efforts to crack down on the menace posed by people who take a principles stance against violence.

Link via Unfogged, where Alex points out that John Yoo must have signed one of these things to teach at Berkeley. This gives us grounds to have him summarily fired, since writing the torture memo is clearly an attack on the constitution.

More one the Quaker menace

The Pentagon continues to keep records on Quaker activities on the grounds that the pacifist religious group constitutes a terrorist threat. Previously I have linked to reports that the Pentagon issued a "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (a TALON) on a meeting of Friends in Florida. The ACLU is now reporting similar TALONs have been issued for activities by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Akron, Ohio and Springfield, Mass.

These new TALONs were issued with all of the competence and sensitivity to the value of human intel we have come to expect from the Global War on Anything We Decide to Label Terrorism. First of all, they misreported the second event as being in Springfield, IL, rather than Springfield Mass. Second, the Pentagon spies apparently found out about this event through the incredibly sophisticated method of "Subscribing to the AFSC emailing list." You'd think that if they had the announcement for the event in front of them, they would get the city right.

There's a fun personal connection here, too. Molly has a lot of family who are Quakers living in the Akron area. My in-laws could be a threat to national security, with their damned nonviolence and mayonnaise heavy, Midwestern cooking.

Via John Collins on the SLU listserv.

The Quaker Menace

The administration and its allies are only trying to fight terrorism, except of course when they are fighting those who take a principled stand against violence altogether. This is something I've been noticing more and more of: the right is targeting not just people who might be sympathetic to Islamic causes (because of, say, their last name) and not just people who are opposed to the current war, but people who criticize militarism and violence altogether.

The Bush defense department has created a agency called Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) which is designed to gather information on threats to the US military and US military contractors. The agency has a system called TALON ("Threat and Local Observation Notice") which gathers unverified reports on possible threats. (Is it just me, or were they really stretching to get an acronym that spelled "talon"?) Among the threats to national security is a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth, Fla. The meeting lent their house out to an organization called the Truth Project, which tries to counter military recruiting of high school students. A member of the Quaker meeting attended the Truth Project meeting to learn more and found that their activities were very much in keeping with (Quaker) principles."

The administration's defense of this program seems to be that the information gathered by TALON is supposed to include a lot of false positives that analysts will weed out later. According to a pentagon spokesman the data collected by TALON "are unfiltered dots of information about perceived threats. An analyst will look at that information. And what we are trying to do is connect the dots before the next major attack." But this is only an attempt to raise the bar on what constituted domestic spying. Now it is ok for the government to keep records on you, so long as they don't use those records improperly. This is bullshit. The government shouldn't be keeping a file on anyone unless they can show the person to be a threat. The government shouldn't be spying on us "just in case." (For more on the Bush administration spying on its political enemies, see the resources Majikthise catalogued here)

In other news, David Horowitz believes
that a professor of peace studies at a Quaker university named Caroline Higgins is one of the one hundred worst professors in America. The criteria for being on the list are purely political. The academics aren't being judged on their scholarship--otherwise how could Chomsky be on the list? Nor do they seem to be judged by their teaching. At least, no effort is made to judge classroom performance, even in a Ratemyprofessor.com sort of way. No, Higgins' crime seems to be that she teaches courses with names like Methods of Peacemaking. Clearly this woman is dangerous. The last thing we want is for people to learn how to resolve conflicts without bloodshed, and perhaps even develop skills for harmonious living.

Now the neat thing about Horowitz enemies list is that you can vote on who you think is the biggest threat to the established order. Michael Bérubé has been campaigning quite successfully to raise his rating. Caroline Higgins meanwhile is languishing at the bottom of the list. I took the time to vote for her, assuming she'd recognize it as a compliment.