Eight years ago, California considered asking public employees to sign a loyalty oath, " do you support and defend" the United States and California constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
"But just how does a loyalty oath guard against such dangers? After all, anyone who is truly disloyal will simply take the oath falsely. No dangerous subversive will be deterred by the requirement of an oath." http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/11/opinion/oe-stone11
"The origins of the California loyalty oath, which all state, city, county, public school, community college and public university employees are required to sign, can be found in the McCarthy era. It was added to the state Constitution in 1952 and was designed, like so many other legal measures of that sorrowful era, not to protect the nation against real subversion but to frighten, intimidate and punish individual citizens for exercising their constitutional right to question and criticize the government....."
"By the end of World War II, with the beginning of the Cold War, most Americans who still had ties to the Communist Party or to organizations with connections to it quickly severed them. But by then it was too late. The most infamous question of the next two decades -- "Are you now or have you ever been ... ?" -- had entered the American lexicon."
What is the ultimatum? the axe-wrenching question that is always asked?
Do you believe this is God's channel of communication/organization?
To guard and protect? or 'frighten and intimidate'? Do we have a 'constitutional right to question and criticize' G.O.D.?