Court Opinion

ID: 9455318
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:18:36.049357+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:33.141821
License: Public Domain

DUNIWAY, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I concur. I do not think that the claimed “crystallization” of conscientious objection can be said to be “a change in * * * status resulting from circumstances over which the registrant has no control.” (Emphasis added.) The word “circumstances” indicates to me some fact, act or event external to the mind or consciousness of the registrant, rather than the mysterious and unfathomable internal mental and spiritual processes of the registrant himself. Whether those processes are beyond the registrant’s control I leave to the philosophers among us. I think that, whatever the answer to that question may be, they are not circumstances beyond his control.
Dictionary definitions tend to confirm this view. Funk & Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary defines “circumstances” as “1. Something existing or occurring incidental to some other act or event-, a related or concomitant act or thing.” (Emphasis added.) Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2d ed., defines the word as “1. One of the conditions under which an act or event takes place or with respect to which a fact is determined; a condition, fact or event accompanying, or determining the occurrence of another fact or event.” (Emphasis added.)
The practical considerations mentioned by my brother Kilkenny strongly reenforce these views. The regulation should be construed in a manner consist-ent with those considerations,
BARNES, and JAMES M. CARTER, circuit Judges, concur in the foregoing concurring opinion,