The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to [California State University East Bay] undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees....

[W]hen asked to "swear (or affirm)" that she would "support and defend" the U.S. and state Constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic," Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote "nonviolently" in front of the word "support," crossed out "swear," and circled "affirm." All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said....

Modifying the oath "is very clearly not permissible," the university's attorney, Eunice Chan, said, citing various laws. "It's an unfortunate situation. If she'd just signed the oath, the campus would have been more than willing to continue her employment." ...

"Based on the advice of counsel, we cannot permit attachments or addenda that are incompatible and inconsistent with the oath," the campus' human resources manager, JoAnne Hill, wrote ....

Hill said Kearney-Brown could sign the oath and add a separate note to her personal file that expressed her views. Kearney-Brown declined. "To me it just wasn't the same. I take the oath seriously, and if I'm going to sign it, I'm going to do it nonviolently." ...

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 Ms. 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 Ms. 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."

Adding "nonviolently" to the oath (or affirmation) thus doesn't change its legal meaning: As the Supreme Court pointed out, the original oath has never been understood to require violent action. Draft laws and other laws may sometimes require such action, but they generally don't require it of women, and in any event it is those laws -- not the oaths required of a wide range of nonmilitary government employees -- that require the action.

So it looks like the state is losing a valuable employee, and has to spend time, money, and effort hiring a new employee. And people who (for religious reasons or other reasons) oppose violence and are especially scrupulous about not promising what they can't deliver lose the opportunity to work in state jobs. As I said, I agree the government should follow the law. But surely the law has enough flexibility in it to avoid this sort of pointless result.

Thanks to Joel Sogol for the pointer.