Breaking: Pentagon Confirms May Court Martial Soldiers Who Share Christian Faith
It continues. Granted, the piece is written from a Protestant perspective, but the consequences for Catholics are obvious. - jv
Breaking: Pentagon Confirms May Court Martial Soldiers Who Share Christian Faith
by Ken Klukowski
Breitbart News
The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: "Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense...Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis...”.
The statement, released to Fox News, follows a Breitbart News report on Obama administration Pentagon appointees meeting with anti-Christian extremist Mikey Weinstein to develop court-martial procedures to punish Christians in the military who express or share their faith.
(From our earlier report: Weinstein is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and says Christians--including chaplains--sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military are guilty of “treason,” and of committing an act of “spiritual rape” as serious a crime as “sexual assault.” He also asserted that Christians sharing their faith in the military are “enemies of the Constitution.”)
Being convicted in a court martial means that a soldier has committed a crime under federal military law. Punishment for a court martial can include imprisonment and being dishonorably discharged from the military.
So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime--possibly resulting in imprisonment--for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains—military officers who are ordained clergymen of their faith (mostly Christian pastors or priests, or Jewish rabbis)--whose duty since the founding of the U.S. military under George Washington is to teach their faith and minister to the spiritual needs of troops who come to them for counsel, instruction, or comfort.
This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life. It’s difficult to imagine how a member of the clergy could give spiritual counseling without saying anything that might be perceived in that fashion.
In response to the Pentagon’s plans, retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, who is now executive vice president of the Family Research Council (FRC), said on Fox & Friends this morning:
“It’s a matter of what do they mean by ‘proselytizing.’...I think they’ve got their defintions a little confused. If you’re talking about coercion that’s one thing, but if you’re talking about the free exercise of our faith as individual soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, especially for the chaplains, they I think the worst thing we can do is stop the ability for a soldier to be able to exercise his faith.”
FRC has launched a petition here which has already collected over 30,000 signatures, calling on Secretary Hagel is stop working with Weinstein and his anti-Christian organization to develop military policy regarding religious faith.
Breitbart News legal columnist Ken Klukowski is senior fellow for religious liberty with the Family Research Council and on faculty at Liberty University School of Law.
On line at:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/01/Breaking-Pentagon-Con...
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Dawn Marie on
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PENTAGON TAPS ANTI-CHRISTIAN EXTREMIST
FOR RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE POLICY
by Ken Klukowski
Brietbart News“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”
Those words were recently written by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in a column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.
Weinstein decries what he calls the “virulent religious oppression” perpetrated by conservative Christians, whom he refers to as “monstrosities” and “pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers,” comparing them to “bigots” in the Deep South during the civil rights era.
He cites Dr. James Dobson—the famous Christian founder of Focus on the Family—as “illustrating the extremist, militant nature of these virulently homophobic organizations’ rhetorically-charged propaganda.” Regarding those who teach orthodox Christian beliefs from the Bible, Weinstein concludes, “Let’s call these ignoble actions what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.”
Weinstein then endorses the ultra-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who publishes a list of “hate groups.” Alongside truly deplorable organizations like the KKK, the SPLC’s list includes a host of traditional Christian organizations (for their support of traditional marriage) and Tea Party organizations (for supporting limited government). Weinstein says SPLC correctly labels them all as “hate groups.”
Floyd Lee Corkins—the first person ever convicted of domestic terrorism in federal court under the laws of Washington, D.C.—told the FBI that he chose his intended shooting spree targets from the SPLC website's map. Corkins was arrested at the offices of the Family Research Council (FRC) after shooting a security guard in August 2012. His court documents state that Corkins intended to kill as many people as possible.
Weinstein also supports Lt. Col. Jack Rich, the Army officer who wrote to subordinate officers that soldiers who hold traditional Christian beliefs agreeing with organizations on SPLC’s “hate group” list are incompatible with “Army values" and should be carefully watched and excluded from military service.
According to Weinstein, “We should as a nation effusively applaud Lt. Col. Rich.” He adds that the nation should “venture further” than Rich’s recommendations, saying, “We MUST vigorously support the continuing efforts to expose pathologically anti-gay, Islamaphobic, and rabidly intolerant agitators for what they are: die-hard enemies of the United States Constitution. Monsters, one and all. To do anything less would be to roll out a red carpet to those who would usher in a blood-drenched, draconian era of persecutions, nationalistic militarism, and superstitious theocracy.”
Many media outlets are silent on this disturbing new alliance between fanatical secularists and leaders in the Pentagon appointed by President Barack Obama and Secretary Chuck Hagel, under which the U.S. military would officially consult with someone with such foaming-at-the-mouth passionate hostility toward traditional Christians, including Evangelicals and devout Catholics. The military—America’s most heroic and noble institution—includes countless people of faith, and this represents a radical departure from the U.S. military’s warm embrace of people of faith in its ranks.
Yet the little coverage this story is getting is positive, such as this Washington Post column that somehow manages not to carry any of these frightening quotes from Weinstein and instead actually endorses the Pentagon’s meeting with him. Sally Quinn’sPost column also approvingly quotes MRFF Advisory Board member Larry Wilkerson as saying, “Sexual assault and proselytizing, according to Wilkerson, ‘are absolutely destructive of the bonds that keep soldiers together.’”
Did you get that? They say having someone share the Christian gospel with you is akin to being raped. Weinstein makes sure there are no doubts, being quoted by the Post as adding, “This is a national security threat. What is happening [aside from sexual assault] is spiritual rape. And what the Pentagon needs is to understand is that it is sedition and treason. It should be punished.”
Another MRFF Advisory Board member, Ambassador Joe Wilson (the far-left husband of CIA employee Valerie Plame from the Iraq War’s yellow-cake uranium scandal a decade ago), said a military chaplain “is to minister to spiritual needs. You don’t proselytize. It’s a workplace violation.”
In other words, it should be the official policy of the United States to decree what a human being’s spiritual needs are, and punish for violations a military officer who is an ordained clergyman who attempts to share his own personal faith with another service member when discussing religious matters. You cannot imagine such a thing ever happening under any previous president.
Weinstein goes on:
If these fundamentalist Christian monsters of human degradation … and tyranny cannot broker or barter your acceptance of their putrid theology, then they crave for your universal silence in the face of their rapacious reign of theocratic terror. Indeed, they ceaselessly lust, ache, and pine for you to do absolutely nothing to thwart their oppression. Comply, my friends, and you become as monstrously savage as are they. I beg you, do not feed these hideous monsters with your stoic lethargy, callousness and neutrality. Do not lubricate the path of their racism, bigotry, and prejudice. Doing so directly threatens the national security of our beautiful nation.
God help us now when someone with such visceral hatred of conservative Christians—literally tens of millions of Americans—who says sharing this gospel is “spiritual rape” is helping develop policies for how to deal with Christians in the military.
Weinstein says those guilty of this “treason” must be “punished.” Under federal law, the penalty for treason is death. And the Obama administration is sitting down to talk with this man to craft new policies for “religious tolerance” in our military.
Breitbart News legal columnist Ken Klukowski is senior fellow for religious liberty at the Family Research Council and on faculty at Liberty University School of Law.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/04/28/Pentagon-Consults-Ext...
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Permalink Reply by Cathleen on
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And this comes right after that Nitwit gave the Congressional Medal of Honor to the saintly Fr. Kapaun for his bravery, inspired directly by his Catholic Faith, in that horrible prison in Korea over 60 years ago. Numerous soldiers, even those who were not even Christian of any sort, survived that hell on earth because of Fr. Kapaun, his prayers and his example. So now what are soldiers supposed to do? Talk to a psychologist? Without God it doesn't make sense, and men become animals. Fr. Kapaun went with "his men" into the POW camp to bring them to God, esp. in the last moments of their lives.
This also reminds me of when Christian soldiers in ancient Rome were told that they had to sacrifice to the gods and instead were martyred. In so many ways, I sometimes feel like I must be in pagan Rome. I think I read somewhere that +Archbishop Lefebvre said that our times are even more dangerous than that of ancient Rome. It was something about how back then the darkness of paganism was pushed back by the light of Christianity....but that now, people are rejecting the light of Christianity and going back to the darkness of paganism. I am not phrasing it as well as he did, but I think that is the gist of it.
Good Fr. Kapaun, pray for us.
Good Archbishop Lefebvre, pray for us.
All you holy Martyrs of Rome, esp. St. George and other soldier-saints, pray for us.
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Permalink Reply by Alley on
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My oldest son is in the Military and he said that they gave a class on this, he said that Catholic's, Evangelicals and Baptists are on the cult list. And they are to be watched for terrorism like the Muslims. I was shocked when I heard this it was a few months ago.
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