Red Is Dead, Except in the Law

Joe Stalin and Joe McCarthy are long gone, along with the Evil Empire. The Communists buried themselves, not us, and were succeeded by the Russian Mafia, a free-enterprise lot if ever there was one. But a remnant of the Red Scare of so many years ago remains on the California lawbooks. Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco), an attorney, stumbled across it while researching a case.

One section of the state government code warns alarmingly about the “worldwide movement to establish a totalitarian dictatorship based upon force and violence.” The law goes on to proclaim that any state employee may be fired for being a member of the Communist Party. A similar section in the education code deals with public school teachers.

Kopp’s reaction? “What the hell is this?” Now Kopp has introduced a bill (SB 1535) to eliminate the archaic verbiage from the law.

Who can argue with the silliness of such a law these days? Well, Sen. Raymond N. Haynes (R-Riverside) for one. He insists that Communist doctrine still demands that adherents work themselves into positions of power within the government. State bureaucrats struggling to save their coffee breaks or fighting for their first raises in three years might question whether they’re climbing to power, Red or not.

We’ll take our chances with Kopp’s bill and count on the governor to protect us from revolution breaking out among the apparatchiks deep in the DMV or the Fish and Game Department.