Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Evangelicals turning US Armed Forces into a Christian Taliban with consent of the Pentagon

That this is happening is pretty sickening, but at least there's one soldier fighting for our Constitution.
Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein shares his hate mail with both friends and strangers the way elderly people show off photos of their grandkids. He has plenty of it to share. For the past four years, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been doing battle with a Christian subculture that, he believes, is trying to Christianize the U.S. armed forces with the help of a complicit Pentagon brass. He calls it the "fundamentalist Christian parachurch-military-corporate-proselytizing complex," a mouthful by which he means holy warriors in contempt of the constitutional barrier between church and state.
The article goes on to highlight the systemic infection - nay, cancer - of Christian Evangelicals in the US Armed Forces that spreads all the way to the top, and notes that the Obama administration is of no help in this matter (unsurprisingly).

As an aside, this statement referring to a quote from a Pentagon spokesperson strikes me as odd:
Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith declined via email to comment on it directly but said that the Defense Department "places a high value on the rights of military members to observe the tenets of their respective religions. [It] does not endorse any one religion or religious organization, and provides free access of religion for all members of the military services."

I believe this can be interpreted to mean that if a Christian soldier wishes to crusade against non-Christians, or if a Muslim soldier decides to wage jihad against fellow soldiers who are infidels, that would be legal. I think she should have chosen her words more carefully.





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