Objectors Must Oppose All War To Qualify for Draft Exemptions

John H. Mansfield '51, professor of Law, said last night that persons who are morally opposed to the Vietnam war -- but not "to war in any form" -- were unlikely to receive exemption from military service, even if their cases were to reach the Supreme Court.

Mansfield made the statement during a Faculty Forum panel discussion in Winthrop Junior Common Room examining "Vietnam, Conscience, and the Draft."

"There is a limit to the amount of moral values the Constitution can absorb," Mansfield asserted. "The idea 'hat one's conscience can never be overruled negates the idea of government."

Title One of the Universal Military Training and Service Act provides exemption for any person "who, by reason of religious training or belief, is conscientiously opposed to war in any form. Religious training and belief in this connection means an individual's belief in relation to a Supreme Being involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation, but does not include essentially political, sociological, or philosophical views or merely a personal moral code."

"Obviously," Mansfield commented, "the law is way out of its depth." He went on to point out that in the case of an agnostic pacifist, Daniel Seeger, the Court threw out the Supreme Being requirement and put on a broad interpretation on "religious belief." But the decision in Seeger's favor specifically refused to commit the court to exempting an atheist pacifist.

"The court was desperate to avoid the Constitutional issue," Mansfield observed.

"The Court has never decided the issue of a man whose moral object is confined to one war." Mansfield noted, "but in a lot of remarks it has indicated that no, there is no such right."

Lewis Mumford, author of The City in History, Technics and Civilization, and numerous other scholarly works, and John Maher, research fellow in Humanities at M.I.T. also addressed the forum.