A congressional Democrat on Sunday said it was “preposterous” that witnesses are still instructed to say “so help me God” in their oaths before testifying before Congress — after his Democratic-led committee attempted to remove the God reference from its oathsearlier this year.
California Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman made the comments on The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Freethought Matters” program, which bills itself on its website as “an antidote to religion on the airwaves and Sunday morning sermonizing.”
“Well, unfortunately, it’s been kind of a sporadic standard,” Huffman said. “Some committees have dropped the oath, others have not. I sit on the Natural Resources Committee and in our original proposed rules for the committee, we proposed that we drop the oath or we allow witnesses to simply say it voluntarily if they chose to, which to me makes perfect sense.”
Huffman, similarly, made no apologies Sunday for his stance on the oath.
“And wouldn’t you know it, [House Republican Conference Chair Rep.] Liz Cheney just went ballistic… And unfortunately my Democratic colleagues backed down, and so we now nominally still have that same oath. But you’re right. It’s unconstitutional to require a witness in congressional testimony to affirm an oath to a deity they may not even believe in, or to affirm an oath to a singular deity when you might be a polytheistic Hindu, for example. It’s just preposterous,” he said. – READ MORE