The chance of the US Constitution being “revised” as you said is so slim as to be negligible.
Has any person who signed the oath ever been fired or prosecuted solely for violating the oath?
Whoa, this thread blew up more than I expected 
Thanks for the feedback so far.
To clear some stuff up…
This job is an absolutely menial position. I’m won’t even be a clerk, just a part-time aide with no policymaking or discretionary powers whatsoever, not even really any advisory stuff. My day-to-day is just helping around the office and occasionally interacting with tourists, handing out brochures and the such (it’s an entry-level student job). The oath is just a formality, and will have pretty much zero impact on my duties. But who knows? In 5-10 years time? I may end up working in some other, more significant role.
But it’s a law nonetheless, and more than that, an oath. Yes, of course I could just sign it and forget about it, like most reasonable people would, and I haven’t altogether ruled out that possibility… but, really, it’s the principle of the thing.
My gripe isn’t with the Constitution(s) per se, but the “I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” part of the oath. As above, I have reservations. I’m fine with probably 90% of the documents, and I can abide by the remaining 10% even if I don’t like it, but I cannot say I support these documents without reservation. The oath isn’t, “I shall abide by the Constitutions of the California and the United States despite my reservations,” which is something I would be fine with. It is that “I will support and defend them […] and have no reservations in doing so.”
Again, can I uphold the Constitution and abide by its laws despite my reservations? Yes. But do I have reservations? Yes. Will they impact the actual job that taxpayers would be paying me for? Astronomically unlikely. The oath isn’t asking me to suck up my reservations and just do my goddamned job – which I’m fine with – but to affirm that I have no reservations to begin with.
I’m not a libertarian and I understand any institution or body of law has its quirks and imperfections. I live and work within these systems, despite my reservations, and yes, prefer to change them through extant democratic processes. But to sign that oath despite my reservations would be, as stated in the law, an act of perjury. Not a great way to start public employment.
I tried for a while to find a definition under California law, but was not successful. Would very much appreciate a cite.
I see a few options going forward:
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Just sign the damned thing and move on. Who cares?
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Don’t take the job.
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Claim a religious exemption and see where secular humanism goes.
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Read the oath more broadly, hoping that the “without reservation” part applies more generally to the California/US democratic processes in their entireties, not specifically to Constitutional Originalism – i.e., that one can wholeheartedly support the fundamentals of American democracy despite having reservations with specific parts of the law or founding documents.
The OP asks if secular humanism is considered a religion. The answer is yes. A federal judge in Oregon ruled in American Humanist Association v. United States of America that secular humanism is a religion.
But the other issue concerns your belief that “loyalty as a public servant should be to the American people, not a political document held hostage by an antiquated and flawed electoral system.” In other words, you wouldn’t support and defend either constitution if it clashed with your personal beliefs. This is precisely why the state requires an oath or affirmation: as an employee, you don’t get to make that call.
You sound like a person of conscience. If you don’t believe you can uphold the state or US constitution constitution across the board, then I don’t see how you could be very satisfied with the job.
Fascinating. Thank you!! I wonder if this would trickle down to the States via federal supremacy?
Not quite. I wouldn’t necessarily support either document if they were revised against the public interest, which is much broader than my own interests. It’s more of a question of direct democracy/populism vs representatives who are not acting in the public good: say, the electoral college, or an Interstate Compact, or a hard-right Constitutional Convention, or questionable Supreme Court appointments, etc. These once-armchair fears suddenly seem to have a lot more relevance these days. (Edit: The difference being “I cannot support this law because I personally disagree with it” vs “I cannot support this law because 80% of voting-age Americans don’t support it but 200 lawmakers, bribed by 5 wealthy individuals, do.”)
My job isn’t legislative, just procedural. I am there to help other office clerks and to help members of the public find information about local lands and such. I have done many similar jobs for similar organizations and questions of Constitutional law never came into purview. It’s a stupid oath left over from an era when rich white Christian men were worried about Communists infiltrating the government.
To me, a reservation isn’t “Oh, it’s possible for something to happen with the Constitution I don’t like or there is phrasing I don’t like therefore I don’t support it 100% wholeheartedly.”
A reservation is (to me, in this context) a condition. “I am going to agree to do this except the parts I don’t agree with. They’ll just have to fire me!” If you know going in that you will refuse to do certain parts of the job, that’s a reservation.
And to be clear, the affirmation/oath isn’t to the Constitution in perpetuity. They can’t change it to include a requirement to kick puppies then say “Haha! You have to stay in this job because you SWORE AN OATH to KICK PUPPIES!”
Umm, as an atheist, you realize that nobody is holding you to account for these ‘oaths’. They mean nothing more than the breath you took to say them or the time you took to sign them. If you are insincere, nobody and nothing is going to hold you to account for your false oath.
I think you should upgrade you atheism to rationality. Rationality is a philosophy heavily based on recent advances in mathematics, used primarily for AI research. A rationalist has no problem signing an oath they don’t mean, because as long as the expected value of (sign) is higher than the expected value of (refuse to sign), as measured against your utility function, you must sign it or you are irrational.
But once again, these are political views, not religious ones. Secular humanism doesn’t require you to being a kind of populist that may reject certain laws; your political views do.
It’s not “without reservation”. It’s “without any mental reservation” which has a highly specific meaning that is not relevant in your case.
To have a mental reservation essentially means that you are lying or equivocating by qualifying or adding some additional words in your head, in such a way as to neutralise or change the plain meaning of the words you are affirming. This was a way for Catholics to deceive without offending their conscience as it was not considered to be sinful to equivocate in this way.
I’m no fan of religion, but I’m mindful of the ways that the power of the state has been used in the past to discriminate against religious minorities. “Take off your religious headgear” might be a practical consideration, or it might be bigotry, and my personal feelings of religious headgear aside, I appreciate the effort this country has taken to walk the line between allowing free exercise and forcing people to follow the law.
Walking this line gets more difficult when people fraudulently use religious exceptions as an end-run around a regulation they don’t like. E.g., anti-vaxxers who claim a religious exemption to get their kids in public school, even though there’s no religion I know of that prohibits vaccination in order to practice the faith.
Maybe I’m just still not understanding the grounds for your objection to the oath, but I’d say ask yourself a simple question – “Does taking this oath prevent me from practicing my chosen religion (in this case, secular humanism) in the manner I feel appropriate given my sincerely held religious beliefs.” If the answer is no, then please don’t try to use a religious exemption, as it will 1) make people roll their eyes as you cause them trouble, and 2) make it harder for actual oppressed religious minorities to get the protection from the government that they might actually need.
I live in California also. Have you seen any religiously based state policies? When I got sworn in as a juror, what I said did not offend me as an atheist in the slightest. There was no so help me god option even.
State legislators propose amendments to the California Constitution all the time without running into the fact that in so doing they are not supporting the existing Constitution 100%. Good enough for them should be good enough for you.
Plus, though I know you aren’t involved in this, the California state government is at the forefront of resisting stuff in Washington which you oppose. You should think that joining it is like joining the right army.
There’s no dilemma here. If the job requires you to do anything you find objectionable then you resign.
That’s a separate thing. The secular humanism objection is to the inclusion of Almighty God in the preamble. It is not a trivial objection, but a deeply held belief that theism should not inform public policy.
Another poster said the preamble doesn’t count, but I don’t see that in the law…?
You are interpreting the oath incorrectly to start with. The “without mental reservation” applies to the preceding clause “take this obligation freely”. It’s got nothing to do with any of the documents/laws you are agreeing to support or whether you have any reservations about anything contained in those laws. It just means that your agreement (taking the obligation) is real and complete and you aren’t doing it with your fingers crossed behind your back - what hibernicus said.
It’s general law. If you read it, you can see why it isn’t law. Preambles say something like “we all got together and thought that laws to protect goats would be a good idea and it is hereby enacted that:
nobody can hit goats blah blah blah”
The “it is hereby enacted” (or whatever it might say in the US or in the particular US state) doesn’t come before the “we had a meeting and thought this law would be a good idea” part - it’s just background, or a bit of a summary of what the act is about.
I think the OP is being far too restrictive in his definitions. Let’s say that I believe a person should have to be 21 years old to vote. Am I failing to support the U.S. Constitution against its enemies?
What about all of the failed proposed amendments in Congress? Are those Congresspeople in violation of their oaths since obviously they disagree with part of the Constitution?
Just to conclude with a brief update: After reading through the comments, I had to turn in my paperwork. I asked the HR person what would happen if I did wish to claim the religious exemption. She made a quick phone call and the other person just said to write a sentence saying “I declare that I have a religious objection to this oath.” So I did, and that was that… a complete non-issue, even more so than I hoped. Nobody cared Phew.
But in case you want some further responses…
An oath doesn’t have to be directed at some supernatural force to have value (not really concerned about the semantics of oath/affirmation). It could just be a social contract of best-effort honesty. Transparency and trust in a community (or democracy) are important to me.
What you’re saying sounds more like the prisoner’s dilemma, perhaps an individual vs communitarian conflict, rather than a theistic vs non-theistic problem. I believe it to be in my rational self-interest to live in a society where people’s promises have value, and further, I believe that long-term societal interests outweigh my individual interests (to a point).
This is an interesting interpretation that I hadn’t heard of. I read up on its religious background, but a few legal dictionaries suggested that the law doesn’t hold this view of the term, instead using it in the general sense that I assumed. The Catholic and Jesuit histories were fascinating, though, so thanks for sharing!
If this is wrong and you know of a cite clarifying that “mental reservation” does mean what you say, I would appreciate it.
Of course I don’t think that California is a theocracy, but having lived in rural towns, believe me… religion is still a significant sociopolitical force. I categorically object to religious corruption in public life, and there is plenty of that to go around, even in California. It’s a huge part of the Republican base, so even the virtue-signaling/dog-whistling language that seems innocent to you has the nefarious purpose of normalizing religion in state affairs.
But I did have reservations (mental or otherwise; I could not find a cite to support hibernicus’s assertion that the law inherits the more limited religious meaning). It makes no sense “to take an obligation freely” when you object to parts of the obligation.
The obligation is to the entirely of the passage: to support and defend the documents, against all enemies blah blah. I could not take that obligation freely while being concerned with the very things it would’ve bound me to; to take that obligation while secretly harboring these reservations would be the “purpose of evasion” it warns against, no?
I don’t think it’s that clear-cut. See section 3 of this analysis or page 608 in this law review article for some of the arguments. Preambles seem legally ambiguous.
Did you make clear that you have a substantive objection to upholding the law; as opposed to a personal objection to making an oath, while asking about your “religious” objection?
no.
It is. 
If you don’t accept that it is, just read the one you are talking about. It sets out the asserted reason for the constitution being established. How can YOU, lowly public servant, change history? If you were ever called upon to “defend” the preamble, all you’d have to say is that that is the stated reason of those who enacted it. Nobody cares whether you “agree” with their reasons.
No. They didn’t care. It’s just meaningless paperwork they wanted to get over with. My written statement was just what I said in the previous post, with no further specification or elaboration. Probably no one will ever see it again. shrug Stupid oath, stupid process.