Now I appreciate Cal State's desire to follow the law; the California Constitution does prescribe the text of the oath, and says "all public ... employees, ... except such inferior officers and employees as may be by law exempted, shall, before they enter upon the duties of their respective offices, take and subscribe the following oath or affirmation." But surely there are times to interpret laws as requiring substantial compliance rather than strict literalism. Even the precedent that Cal State's Human Resources director JoAnne Hill cites as supposedly requiring the exact text of the oath (see the article for more on that) seems to take this view: It rejected the applicant's modified oath only after stressing that the modifications were not "surplusage" or "innocuous or merely expository," but rather "ma[d]e equivocal the essential oath preceding [the applicant's personal statement]." Likewise, the venerable principle that laws should be interpreted in a way that minimizes possible constitutional problems (here chiefly First Amendment problems related to compelled speech) counsels in favor of reading the law to provide some flexibility. In light of this, letting Marianne Kearney-Brown sign the entire oath, simply with the addition of a term, seems sufficiently consistent with the state mandate.

True, the Supreme Court has held that it doesn't violate the First Amendment to require certain narrow loyalty oaths, including support-and-defend oaths, for government employees. But the Court's justification was precisely that these oaths "do[] not require specific action in some hypothetical or actual situation"; they embody "simply a commitment to abide by our constitutional system ... [and] a commitment not to use illegal and constitutionally unprotected force to change the constitutional system."

Political turmoil and the retreat of freedom have managed to make people hungry even in places where many previously were not. Heading the U.N.’s list of countries where people are most undernourished, for instance, is Zimbabwe. When the country became independent in 1980 it had, according to the Index of Economic Freedom, “extensive natural resources, a diversified economy, a well developed infrastructure, and an advanced financial sector,” as well as networks of productive farms. But the increasingly repressive regime of strongman Robert Mugabe has destroyed property rights, allowed favored government officials to seize control of farm lands, and been hostile to Western investment, in the process transforming the country “from the breadbasket of Africa into a starving, destitute tyranny,” according to the Index of Economic Freedom.

In many places, hunger is prevalent even though natural resources are plentiful. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where two-thirds of the country’s 62 million people are undernourished, citizens lived amid constant chaos after war broke out in the mid-1990s and the country became a battle ground for troops from eight nations in the so-called African World War, in which more than 5 million people died mostly from starvation and disease. Tragically but perhaps not surprisingly, despite abundant resources including copper, cobalt and diamonds, as well as “enormous agricultural potential” according to the United Nations, the DRC is one of the world’s poorest countries, where production of food has declined some 40 percent since war broke out.

There's also a measure of hypocrisy to all of this. Gov. Richardson is a staunch supporter of red-light cameras. Mayor Fenty supports his city's red-light and speed cameras, despite the fact that D.C.'s red-light cameras have been plagued by charges of corruption, poor maintenance and the tendency to issue tickets to innocent motorists. Gov. Rendell presided over the installation of the first surveillance cameras in Philadelphia (after, it's worth adding, a $75,000 campaign contribution from the company that was awarded the contract to install them).

All these politicians have supported laws that could generally be seen as anti-motorist, be it allowing for camera surveillance of public roads, increasing fines and punishments for traffic offenses or adding new offenses to the books. All sanctimoniously sign these bills while mouthing high-minded rhetoric about public safety (usually, such bills are more about generating revenue for city coffers). But the minute "public safety" conflicts with their own sense of self-importance, these politicians are quick to dispense with the laws they expect the rest of us to follow.

In its efforts to protect the children in this case and to promote some goods that public schools are said to accomplish (as do many families that homeschool) the court has potentially made it nearly impossible to homeschool in California. The many who are decent and scrupulous about caring for the good of their children and of their country are sacrificed because a few might not do well by their children. We might as well take all children out of their parental homes because some parents are abusive behind closed doors. (With updates here and here.)

While many believe this to be a textbook case for more aggressive government regulation, a little investigation finds just the opposite.

According to the General Accounting Office, current U.S. Department of Agriculture food inspection practice "suffers from overlapping and duplicative inspections, poor coordination, inefficient allocation of resources, and outdated inspection procedures."