Religion and the Military

Last week, when Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, the new head of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), held a commander's call to introduce himself to DISA's employees, the new boss showed a PowerPoint presentation that included the 18 rules he lives by.

Scott Air Force Base in Illinois will be holding its annual National Prayer Breakfast. The guest speaker this year will be Esther Jungreis, a Holocaust survivor who founded the international Hineni movement in 1973 to discourage intermarriage and Jewish participation in cults.

Well, it doesn't get any clearer than this. In an article from the Baptist Press, the news arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Southern Baptists have finally come right out and admitted that they oppose religious equality in the U.S. military.

n an article yesterday on the ACLJ website, specifically going after Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), David French puts the 'poor bullied Christians' spin on the Pendleton cross controversy.

Religious neutrality by the government does not equal persecution of Christians, no matter how many times FOX News and "Team Sekulow" keep claiming it does.

A group of Air Force cadets tells MRFF that they decided to resort to doing whatever they had to do to play the role of the "right kind" of Christian cadets, all the while living in constant fear of being "outed."

As late as three days ago, September 26, the leadership at the U.S. Air Force Academy was still unwilling to distribute a watershed memorandum issued by Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz on "Maintaining Government Neutrality Regarding Religion."

Is it any wonder that cadets and staff at the Air Force Academy have lost all faith (no pun intended) in the Academy's leadership?

For years, MRFF has been saying that if the military would only start paying equal attention and giving equal weight to both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, many of the problems being reported by our service members would solve themselves.

Upon the revelation of this second completely inappropriate Air Force training presentation, the Air Force has now decided to review all of its ethics training materials. That should make Senator Cornyn's head explode.

Unlike the other fundamentalist Christian para-church military ministries, which employ retired military personnel to be their "insiders," about 80 percent of Officers' Christian Fellowship members are true insiders.

When the average American thinks of military spending on religion, they probably think only of the money spent on chaplains and chapels. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Michael Savages rant against Mikey Weinstein this week included some remarks that were apparently so offensive that they even had to be edited out of even a show as offensive as his.

In its latest attempt to give the appearance of concern about complaints of religious intolerance, the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) recently conducted a five-day "investigation" that (big surprise) found that there were no problems at all.

The administration's efforts to avert retaliation by bin Laden's supporters was probably just canceled out this morning when it was reported the commander of the SEAL unit embellished the mission's communications with: "For God and Country."

No expense is spared when it comes to evangelizing the military -- and that includes evangelizing the children of our service members.

Saying that his "commitment to [his] God supersedes [his] commitment to the DOD," Air Force Lt. Col. Stacy L. Maxey has publicly vowed to violate military regulations and his oath to the U.S. Constitution if DADT is repealed.