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.
The oath required, in part, that volunteers "support and defend" the United States and Illinois constitutions and swear not to "advocate nor become a member of any political party or organization" that advocated the overthrow of the state or federal governments "by force or violence."
Parman said she told volunteer coordinators that she thought the oath violated her First Amendment rights. The coordinators, Parman said, then denied her access to the volunteer center at Fosco Park Community Center.
"It is an invasion of privacy and totally irrelevant to the volunteer work at hand," said Parman, a University of Illinois-Chicago graduate student.
Parman's is another in a wide range of frustrations volunteers have encountered as they tried to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Volunteers at Chicago-area relief centers waited for days without anything to do as evacuees trickled in. Buses from Wisconsin came home empty after arriving too late to transfer refugees out of the Superdome in New Orleans.
And groups of volunteer firefighters languished in Atlanta hotel for days at a time awaiting a mission, while other firefighters from Bensenville, Ill., got almost all the way to the Gulf Coast in early September before they were ordered home in a power struggle with village officials.
In Parman's case, a City of Chicago spokesman said the loyalty form was not mandatory and she should not have been turned away from volunteering.
"If she was turned away, it was not done in malice," said Larry Merritt, with the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communication. "The city would welcome her to volunteer."
But Illinois Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Patti Thompson insisted the oath was a routine form, required by state law, because volunteers essentially become de facto state employees who, if injured while doing good works, would be eligible for workers compensation.
"If we're going to cover people, we're bound by this language," Thompson said.
Merritt and Thompson said they had not heard other complaints about the oath, but First Amendment experts raised concerns.
"It's hard to identify a legitimate government interest in getting this information from volunteers," said Colleen Connell, president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. "All it does is harass volunteers on the basis of past membership activities."
A 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld the constitutionality of loyalty oaths requiring public employees to defend the Constitution and oppose the overthrow of the government.
However, other rulings have determined it unconstitutional to require people to sign oaths assuring they had never participated in organizations advocating the overthrow of the government. Such oaths gained prominence during the anti-Communist "red scare" of the Cold War.
In that respect, the oath Parman was asked to sign didn't pass constitutional muster, said Rodney Blackman, a DePaul University law professor.
"When we're talking about volunteer work that has almost nothing to do with what's asked in the oath, it's almost certainly unconstitutional," Blackman said.
As originally published
Say it with a bumper sticker
$3 each, or two for $5
| All republished material is copyrighted by its original publisher.
It is reprinted by Unknown News without permission, solely for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting, in accordance with the Fair Use Guidelines of copyright material under § 107 of U.S.C. Title 17:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors. |
|
|
There's much more than this at Unknown News.
|
|
|
