NJ bank won’t notarize American Atheist documents for ‘personal reasons’

[struggle4progress]

20. I don't know the case law. Some states explicitly require notaries to perform their duties

without partiality; and I should expect such impartial performance would generally be expected of public officials in any state; the standards of national organizations might carry some weight, were this matter to land in court, and perhaps someone interested in the matter will find impartiality listed as an expected standard by some national notary organization, though I myself am too lazy to scan such documents in search of it

If one can demonstrate impartiality as an expected legal standard for notaries (as I strongly suspect one can), it is still not absolutely clear to me how the matter would resolve in court, since (for example) the notary in question might make some argument as "I was unable to maintain impartiality here and so sought another notary" -- and that may not always be a specious argument: notaries are sometimes advised, say, not to notarize documents of family members, on the grounds that their impartiality might be questionable; and one can imagine other circumstances in which a notary might question his/her own ability to perform the act impartially and hence might appropriately direct the requester to another notary

I've never discussed document contents with a notary: the notary just adds (by stamp) legally-required boiler-plate for the notarization, embosses the document with a notary seal, then signs the stamp. But I don't know what NJ law requires

I can't really understand why a notary would act as reported here, and it seems silly to me. But the details are sketchy, and so far the only ordinary media source is the Washington Times, which just reports the AA version, without further investigative effort, so I won't pretend to know much about the story, other than what AA says happened