A reader writes:
I just wanted to write in and take you to task for the quote, “While I wouldn’t have excluded Communists, past Communists, or Communist sympathizers from all federal jobs (not because I like them, but because of the First Amendment), I surely think it’s perfectly constitutional and proper to exclude them from secret nuclear weapons research.”
Does being a communist guarantee that state secrets will be passed on?
How about we change your statement to,
“While I wouldn’t have excluded CHRISTIANS, past CHRISTIANS, or CHRISTIANS sympathizers from all federal jobs (not because I like them, but because of the First Amendment), I surely think it’s perfectly constitutional and proper to exclude them from secret nuclear weapons research.”
Because, well, they might pass state secrets on to the Vatican, or say a pastor in Korea. Just because one is “X” and a repressive regime claims to be “X”, doesn’t mean I will give secrets because we share “X” in common.
Someone else e-mailed me a similar question, pointing to Jews rather than to Christians.
I think this analogy is misguided. First, in fact we were not in a Cold War against an evil regime whose main ideology, as opposed to ours, was Christian or Jewish. Nor does Christian or Jewish ideology these days generally call for the destruction by revolution of non-Christian or non-Jewish states (back when it did, the matter might well have been different). Standard Communist ideology in the 1930s through the 1950s did indeed call for that. Not everyone who was a Communist might have adhered to that ideology, but that was the official view, and many did adhere to it.
Second, I don’t think that the test for secret nuclear weapons research jobs should be “[Is it] guarantee[d] that state secrets will be passed on?” When the danger of secrets being passed on is so great, the government should be able to eliminate even modest risks. That someone has only recently belonged to a group whose official ideology calls for the triumph of our enemies and the destruction — likely violent destruction — of our system is pretty substantial evidence that he is not entirely trustworthy. The government may exclude him from such very dangerous, top secret jobs even without a “guarantee” that he will betray us.
In 1942, the government need not have hired in military intelligence or weapons research former Nazi party members, or even people who joined groups that appeared to have strong Nazi sympathies. In 1950, it need not have hired former Communist party members. Today, it need not hire people who had been members of radical Muslim groups whose official ideologies called for the destruction of America, or even people who had expressed such sympathies. If thirty years from now, there was a militant Christian denomination against which we were fighting, I’d say the same about members of those groups. And there’d be no need, I think, to wait for evidence that “guarantee[s] that state secrets will be passed on” before those members are excluded from such jobs.
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