Say Anything Blog

This sort of thing is completely unnecessary.

FORT RILEY, Kan. — When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

Last month, Specialist Hall and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, filed suit in federal court in Kansas, alleging that Specialist Hall’s right to be free from state endorsement of religion under the First Amendment had been violated and that he had faced retaliation for his views. In November, he was sent home early from Iraq because of threats from fellow soldiers.

Is Specialist Hall 100% right in this issue?  Probably not.  Iraq, undoubtedly, is a pretty tense place and adding religious turmoil to the mix is a recipe for trouble.  If Hall was rabble-rousing that certainly has no place on deployment.  But even so, Hall has a right to exercise his beliefs every bit as much as his fellow soldiers.  I’m sure there is bible study in Iraq, so why not a meeting for atheists?

Fair is fair.  If Major Welborn’s actions are accurately described above (and I’m certainly not going to take the New York Times’ word for it) he should have been the one sent home from Iraq.  Not Spc. Hall.

The real problem here is that the New York Times is taking this isolated, though admittedly ugly, situation and trying to turn it into some sort of blanket condemnation of the military in general:

Specialist Hall’s lawsuit is the latest incident to raise questions about the military’s religion guidelines. In 2005, the Air Force issued new regulations in response to complaints from cadets at the Air Force Academy that evangelical Christian officers used their positions to proselytize. In general, the armed forces have regulations, Ms. Lainez said, that respect “the rights of others to their own religious beliefs, including the right to hold no beliefs.”

To Specialist Hall and other critics of the military, the guidelines have done little to change a culture they say tilts heavily toward evangelical Christianity. Controversies have continued to flare, largely over tactics used by evangelicals to promote their faith. Perhaps the most high-profile incident involved seven officers, including four generals, who appeared, in uniform and in violation of military regulations, in a 2006 fund-raising video for the Christian Embassy, an evangelical Bible study group.

“They don’t trust you because they think you are unreliable and might break, since you don’t have God to rely on,” Specialist Hall said of those who proselytize in the military. “The message is, ‘It’s a Christian nation, and you need to recognize that.’ ”

That’s a rather serious accusation, but there’s actually not a lot of evidence to back it up.  A fact the New York Times buries in the story:

It is unclear how widespread religious discrimination or proselytizing is in the armed forces, constitutional law experts and leaders of veterans’ groups said. No one has independently studied the issue, and service members are reluctant to come forward because of possible backlash, those experts said.

There are 1.36 million active duty service members, according to the Pentagon, and since 2005, it has received 50 formal complaints of religious discrimination, Ms. Lainez said.

50 complaints out of 1.36 million active-duty members of the military.

That’s not exactly an epidemic, even if some complaints are suppressed because of fear of retaliation.  But hey, it’s a negative story about the military so the Times isn’t going to let trifling things like “facts” get in their way.