Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, October—December 2008

— Rick Jahnkow
    

On September 17, 2008, the U.S. Senate was presented with an amendment to the 2009 military authorization bill that would have forced high schools to accept military training. The amendment would have accomplished this by denying all federal funds to any school district that did not allow the various military branches to establish, maintain or operate a unit of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). Each military branch has its own JROTC program.

The amendment was introduced by Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and was buried among over 250 other amendments proposed for the 2009 military authorization bill. The method of attaching such amendments to major pieces of legislation is the way Congress passed laws in the 1990s that require colleges and universities to grant access to military recruiters and permit the establishment of college ROTC units. Those laws, which were later upheld by the Supreme Court, paved the way for an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 that is now forcing school districts to give recruiters access to secondary school students.

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2008

— Rick Jahnkow
    

California has moved closer to passing Assembly Bill 2994, which would grant high school students greater protection from aggressive military recruiters.

The legislation, introduced by Assembly members Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View) and Loni Hancock (D-East SF Bay), passed the Assembly education and veterans affairs committees and was approved by the full Assembly by a vote of 45 to 33. It then passed the Senate education committee and was headed for a floor vote in the Senate at the time of our newsletter publication. If passed by the Senate, it will go to Gov. Schwarzenegger for his signature or veto.

AB 2994 would make it easier for parents and students to learn about and exercise their right to opt out when high schools release student names, addresses and phone numbers to military recruiters and colleges. The release of this information is required for schools to receive federal education funds, though parents and students can ask to be excluded. AB 2994 would place the opt-out notice on the emergency information cards that are often completed when students register for school. Check-off boxes would be included to separately indicate if a student’s contact information is to be withheld from the military and/or colleges.

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From Draft NOtices, November-December 2002


— Marion Morgan
    

November 30, 2002, will mark the 92nd anniversary of the death of American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, more commonly known as Mark Twain. While many are familiar with Twain for his fiction, most notably Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his political writings comprise a significant and important part of his work. Twain's incisive and scathing speeches, essays, and sketches on America's imperialistic and militaristic practices — and the support drummed up for them in the name of patriotism — drew widespread attention both in this country and abroad.

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Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS

When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:

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