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Who’s Threatening Military Chaplains’ Religious Freedom? Southern Baptists

By Peter Montgomery

…s? Turns out they were right, but the threat isn’t from gay couples or the military hierarchy—it’s from the Southern Baptist Convention. Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin recounts the tale of Air Force Col. Timothy Wagoner, who was present at—not even officiating—a union ceremony between two men at the chapel he oversees. “I wouldn’t miss it,” Wagoner told Army Times, “I don’t feel I’m compromising my beliefs… I’m supporting the community.” T…

The Islamophobia Industrial Complex

By Sarah Posner

…”) Just after the 2008 election, the Secular Coalition for America and the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers asked the incoming Obama administration to change military regulations to protect the rights of non-adherents. The two groups also sought to improve the process for investigating and punishing cases of proselytizing and religious discrimination. Yet there’s still too little attention paid to both issues — in no small part be…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…

Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

By Ira Chernus

…he [imagined] danger through aggression and power.” As Beinart argues, the number of American Jews who act out of fantasied oppression is declining. But their political strength remains much greater than their numbers. Yet curiously Lerner, the professional psychologist, downplays this and the other psychological wellsprings of support for militant Zionism. Instead he focuses time and again on compassion for the very real historical sufferings of…

Leaked Air Force Legal Opinion Approves Religious Expression

By Paul Rosenberg

…e invocation. “It’s directly contrary” to AFI 1-1, Luchenitser said. “If a military officer makes religious references in a military ceremony that would certainly be construed by the service members as officially endorsing or extending preferential treatment to whatever faith the military officer is referencing in the speech.” There’s also an element of bad faith. “The idea that any commander in the military is going to thank anybody other than Ch…

Escalating Afghanistan: What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?

By Peter Laarman

…y it clearly and see how it feels upon the tongue: today’s “all-volunteer” military represents a contemporary form of helotry. We give the great majority of our young very little hope for a foothold in our collapsed economy; then we send them off to fight and die (or, given the significant advancements in military field medicine, to return home horribly damaged) in order to “defend” the grossly unequal society that dealt them such a bad hand in th…

5 Reasons the Muslim Brotherhood Won’t Turn On Israel

By Haroon Moghul

…rd the military (assuming the revolution succeeds, it’ll only succeed with military support). The same Egyptian military that gets $1.3 billion from the United States in aid every year doesn’t want to jeopardize that aid—for which reason it will look very suspiciously on any political agenda that wants to antagonize Israel and threaten a major source of its funding. Imagine a cabinet meeting in which a minister, affiliated with the Brotherhood, su…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

Judge Halts “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Discharges

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ued an injunction preventing the military from discharging gay and lesbian military service members under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. US District Judge Virginia A. Phillips ruled Tuesday that the policy “infringes the fundamental rights” of military service members and prospective service members and violates their rights to due process and freedom of speech. Her ruling bars the Pentagon from enforcing or applying the policy and orders the…