Your husband’s situation highlights another corrosive feature of Sotomayor’s stupid proposition - mandatory public “service” cheapens authentic public service.
There was a time when a major contribution to the common good was voluntary activity - by churches, by fraternal organizations, by local community groups. Even deToqueville commented on how he was impressed by the way local communities prospered by voluntary activities initiated by the citizenry.
Then the liberal/socialist mindset decided that such things were best handled by bureaucrats, and gradually the role of church-based schools and hospitals, fraternal aid societies and community groups were marginalized to give us the dysfunctional systems we live with today (hello, Obamacare, etc).
There is a statistically provable inverse correlation between how liberal the voting patterns of a State are, and now much the people of that state give to charity. The Lib mindset is “that’s the government’s job, I don’t have to do it.”
School districts in the state of Washington require mandatory community volunteerism by high school students. I guess we never had a slave issue in this country; it was actually mandatory community volunteerism that also included free relocation.