(FORTUNE Magazine) – It is Sunday evening, January 27, and your servant sits at the keyboard shrouded in gloom. Whence his blues? Mainly from the extra-heavy subject of this composition, a guaranteed downer. Also from the fact that he cannot watch the Super Bowl live, as Keeping Up goes to press tomorrow and FORTUNE's production folks offer no exceptions for Giants fans who once watched the Maramen in knickers. (The pantaloons were ours, not theirs.) We are working around this scheduling disaster by videotaping the game as we type away here, the plot being to later whiz through a 90-minute version -- no commercials, no time outs -- before conking. Still, it doesn't seem right to be brooding over C.O.s when great events are taking place in Tampa. Conscientious objection is a subject that was supposed to vamoose when the Nixonites ended the draft in 1973. So now we have armed forces nobody is required to join against his will, and Nexis is nevertheless offering 87 news stories about C.O.s just for the first 26 days in January. The stories collectively signal that discussion of conscientious objection, which progressively lost touch with reality in the Sixties, will soon be back on that trajectory. Until the Vietnam period, you could look upon conscientious objection laws as a true ornament of American democracy. The laws were traceable to the mid- 19th century. In the Civil War, both the North and South responded to pressure from the Society of Friends and other religious pacifists who persuasively argued that no power on earth could make them bear arms. The laws as passed exempted Quakers, Mennonites, and others who equated conscience with God's will and believed that God forbade military service. In both world wars, the U.S. continued to provide such statutory exemptions, and in World War II they were no longer limited to members of pacifist sects. The 1948 draft law incorporated the logic and language of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, arguing that (a) the Constitution protects the free exercise of religion and (b) ''the essence of religion is belief in a relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation.'' As recently as 1965, the law required that the objections to service be rooted in belief in a ''Supreme Being'' and that they be distinguishable from ''political, sociological, or philosophical views or a merely personal moral code.'' By the time Vietnam came along, conscripts on average were much more secularized than those of earlier generations -- which logically implied that conscientious objection should be a declining issue. But logic had nothing to do with it. Beginning in 1965, draft boards were overwhelmed by young men seeking to represent as religious -- often with the aid of Quaker-provided ''draft counselors'' -- their plainly political objections to the war. It should be obvious that no system of conscription can co-exist with exemptions based on conscripts' political judgments. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court weighed in during the Vietnam years with two decisions that badly blurred the distinction between political and religious belief. In the 1965 Seeger case, the court said that religious belief no longer had to depend on a Supreme Being. In the 1970 Welsh case, it went even further and allowed conscientious objection based on ''moral, ethical, or religious beliefs about what is right or wrong'' -- a formulation that totally undermined the congressional distinction between religious and moral beliefs and came perilously close to allowing any conscript in America to claim C.O. status. A ruling the Supreme Court did not issue was one in favor of ''selective conscientious objection.'' This is the right to C.O. status based on objection to particular wars but not all war. Although selective objection would seem to be a position not logically attainable except via political distinctions, C.O. status for such objectors was demanded during the Vietnam era by an avalanche of authority figures ranging from President Kingman Brewster of Yale to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Selective objection is, of course, what it's all about in the current round of claims against military service. What other claim could, after all, be made by a volunteer suddenly proclaiming that he cannot bear arms against Saddam? Some claims are even more bizarre, our own favorite being the recruit whose claim rests on the fact that the U.S. is not planning to use nuclear weapons (which, he argues, would end the war sooner). We are gloomily bracing ourselves for lots more illogic when the antiwar movement gets into high gear, though feeling quite positive about the late returns from Tampa.