We return for a moment to the issue of the swearing of oaths that has recently gotten under the skin of both Dennis Prager and Representative Virgil Goode.

The Head Heeb provides some excellent historical background on the swearing of oaths, noting the presence in British common law of allowing persons of different faiths to swear upon their own holy books dating back to the middle 1700s in Great Britain.  He further notes the existence of the practice as far back as 10th Century in Europe.

So, if it wasn’t already obvious, Prager and Goode are all wet on this subject, so to speak.

As the HH rightly notes:

The measure that Goode and Prager are describing as revolutionary and threatening has been part of the common law since before the United States even existed, and has been applied in countless trials, state legislative proceedings, citizenship ceremonies and other places where oaths are taken. And the last time I looked, the country was still here.

Actually, the principle at issue in the Ellison controversy goes back even further than that. Oaths have always been recognized as a personal matter, and courts from time immemorial have viewed it as critical that witnesses view their oaths as binding. Thus, the one thing that was never taken away from Jews, even during the darkest periods of persecution in medieval Europe, was the right to swear on the Old Testament.

[...]

What Prager and Goode seek to deny Ellison, then, is one of the most personal aspects of religious freedom, and one that would not only have been granted to a Muslim in eighteenth-century London but to a Jew in tenth-century Byzantium. Before the First Amendment existed, John Morgan and other Muslims took their oaths on the Koran, gave the testimony that their consciences dictated, and were thus recognized as participants in the public life of their countries. Now that the Constitution ensures not only the right to participate but the right to do so on the basis of equality, the case in Ellison’s favor is even more open and shut. There’s someone deviating from American constitutional principles here, but Ellison isn’t the one.

The entire post is worth reading.

h/t: e-mail from MSS.