In Oregon, dueling gets you barred from office. One lawmaker wants to change that.

If you participate in any way in a duel in Oregon, you are not eligible to hold state office. It says so in Oregon’s state constitution.

Now, 160 years later, an Oregon lawmaker wants to get rid of that prohibition not because he wants to engage in a duel, but because he wants to clean up the state constitution. Sen. Brian Boquist, R-Dallas, introduced Senate Joint Resolution 44, which would give voters the opportunity to remove Article II, Section 9 from the state constitution.

It reads: “Penalty for dueling. Every person who shall give, or accept a challenge to fight a duel, or who shall knowingly carry to another person such challenge, or who shall agree to go out of the State to fight a duel, shall be ineligible to any office of trust, or profit.”

“There’s a whole bunch of laws that we just don’t use anymore that are seriously outdated. Now the dueling clause in the constitution is one of those,” Boquist said, according to KOUW.

“Lots of people point to this or that constitutional clause as a requirement when in fact the constitution is full of old arcane requirements,” Boquist told OregonLive.com.

KOUW reports that the law dates to 1845, before Oregon became a state.

The bill remains in a senate committee.

Boquist, a 58-year-old Army veteran, served two terms in the Oregon House and is in his third term in the Oregon Senate.

In 1970, voters decisively rejected a proposal to eliminate about 10,000 words from the state constitution, including Article II, Section 9, according to KOUW.

In 2015, the Idaho legislature passed a law repealed a part of state code that said Idaho held jurisdiction of a person died in the state while being injured in an out-of-state duel. The bill had been passed by Idaho’s first territorial legislature in 1864, apparently in response to the famous 1804 Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel. Hamilton died in New York even though the duel took place in New Jersey. Both states charged Burr with murder, according to the Associated Press.

Dueling in the United States began around the American Revolution and lasted until after the Civil War, according to Smithsonian.com.

This story was originally published April 7, 2017 at 6:50 PM with the headline "In Oregon, dueling gets you barred from office. One lawmaker wants to change that.."