Muzzling Military Chaplains

One of the items on Obama’s second term agenda is to root out traditionally Christian chaplains from the military. He sees them as bigots unworthy of conscience protections. Like Chick-fil-A, they don’t uphold Obama’s “values.”

Obama’s mouthpieces in the military have already blurted this out. In 2010, Admiral Michael Mullen told a Christian chaplain who opposed the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that “If you cannot get in line, resign your commission.” That same year Lieutenant General Thomas P. Bostick, the Army’s deputy chief of staff in charge of personnel, said military members who dissent from Obama’s gay rights agenda should “get out.”

“Unfortunately, we have a minority of service members who are still racists and bigoted and you will never be able to get rid of all of them,” he said, as reported by the Washington Times. “But these people opposing this new policy will need to get with the program, and if they can’t, they need to get out.”

Pentagon officials go through the motions of saying that military chaplains still enjoy religious freedom. But this claim grows ever more lawyerly and narrow. When Defense Department Counsel Jeh C. Johnson testified before Congress about the implications of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy’s collapse for religious freedom, he said that it would not affect what a chaplain said in “the religious context.” In other words, chaplains would be punished for objecting to Obama’s gay rights agenda anywhere outside of a pulpit.

But even that feeble promise isn’t worth taking seriously, since Obama’s military officials have already regulated sermons from the pulpit. Last year they forbade Catholics chaplains from orally criticizing the HHS mandate, permitting only a printed objection to it. How long before the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains requires vetting of all sermons on homosexuality?

Read More at The American Spectator . By George Neumayr.

Photo Credit: John H. Wright (Creative Commons)