Whenever my high school teachers attempted to inflict math instruction on me, I raised a conscientious objection.
My brain is focused on creating extraordinary prose. I will create a newspaper column of such value that it may replace the art on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
In the face of such impending value to society, I said, in a conscientiously objecting sort of way, I can’t possibly risk brain damage by learning trigonometry.
We compromised. I learned enough multiplication and division so that I could determine earned run averages and batting averages and profit margins of business newspapers that don’t pay their columnists very well — not that I would ever need to know anything like that.
Compromise in the face of a conscientious objector is often the best road to follow. Consider the legislation that was before Connecticut’s General Assembly designed to coddle public school students who raise a conscientious objection to dissecting frogs and rabbits and hapless substitute teachers.
After slicing through the House of Representatives like a scalpel through a frog liver, the legislation died a quiet death in the Senate — in large part because senators saw the issue to be almost as icky as dissecting something.
The legislative intent: the kids would bring a sufficiently pathetic letter from their parents to justify the conclusion that the objection to cutting up previously living things would pass muster as a “conscientious” objection.
The kids would be allowed to do computer simulations or find some other indirect way to gain an intellectual understanding of frog tendons.
If the legislation is ever to pass in Connecticut, as it already has in a few sissy states, a more stern compromise may be required. We don’t want our kids simply running away from life’s challenges. As Rep. DebraLee Hovey of Monroe commented, “suck it up.”
Perhaps the squeamish kids could be required to sit real close to the corpse, while student colleagues did the actual dissection. That’s not much different than assistant editors sitting next to editors, while a columnist’s work of art is despoiled by editing. The assistant editor isn’t really responsible, but he learns the tricks of the trade.
The complexities of conscientious objectors have often found their way not only into the legislative process, but the courtroom as well. The issue often centers on whether or not the objection is credible — and whether the deviation from the societal norm is worthy of respect — or potentially dangerous.
What often comes to mind in the conscientious objection portfolio are religious objections to war. One of the most high profile of these in Connecticut involved a Canadian theology professor at Yale who refused to affirm the boilerplate citizenship requirement to bear arms in support of the United States. He wasn’t a hard-core pacifist, but he wanted to pick and choose wars to support that he believed to be “morally justified.”
The 1931 U.S. Supreme Court case (Macintosh v. United States) produced a dismal, murky 5-4 decision denying him citizenship and obligating him to root for Canadian hockey teams for the rest of his days.
Whether this case involved an important constitutional question, or merely a quirky issue of “citizenship” vocabulary, is open to question — but the “war” cases are considerably more interesting and important than whether frogs and rabbits must die so the biology curriculum may live.
Conscientious objector status for kids in a biology lab seems a frivolous use of the concept and the term — and an issue unworthy of formal legislation. This is one of those little messes best left to individual school systems to work out.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
