POS

Published On: June 3, 2016|Categories: MRFF's Inbox|0 Comments|

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You are a disgusting and vile human being.  I wish people like you would stop hiding behind pc BS and lies and come out as the racist bigots you are!! Be honest with yourself and just say you hate Christians and anyone that doesn’t think like you. But I know you would never do that because you are a coward!

(name withheld)


Good Day, (name withheld) –
Thanks for taking the time to write to the MRFF. Clearly, you are upset. Equally clearly, you hold a false notion about the MRFF and what we do.
We don’t “hate Christians”. In fact, the vast majority of MRFF supporters and clients are Christians. I’m one of them — a lifelong, committed Christian as well as a USAF Academy graduate (’85) and a veteran USAF officer.  So to breathlessly assert that we are “racist bigots” who “hate Christians” but will never admit it because we are “cowards” is simply incorrect.
But I’ll tell you what we do “hate” — that would be efforts by any military leader of any religious belief (including non-belief) to misuse his position or the color of his authority to advance a personal religious agenda within our military. We really hate that, and we will vehemently oppose any misconduct of that sort, regardless of the particular beliefs being touted by the leader. There is an appropriate time, place and manner for a military leader to express personal beliefs, and there are also situations where such an expression is inappropriate with respect to the time, place, or manner.  When that line of official religious neutrality is crossed, we will challenge the conduct.
Clearly, you don’t agree with the efforts of the MRFF. That’s okay. But it doesn’t change the fact that our mission is honorable and necessary.
Thanks again for writing.
Peace,
Mike Challman
Christian, USAF veteran, MRFF supporter

 Dear (name withheld),
Contrary to what is written about us, we are neither an atheist organization nor are we anti-Christian. Mikey is Jewish (and prays to the same Father we do 3 times a day) and 80% of the Board, Advisory Board, volunteers and supporters of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) are Christians. In fact, 96% of our 45,000+ soldier clients are Christians – Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodist, Lutherans, Baptists, etc. We fight for the rights of these Christians more than any other religion but it never makes the news.
Here are just a few of the military personnel involved with the MRFF whom we thank for their service and rely on for their expertise on religion in the military: We also have liaisons on almost every base in the world.
Board Members
Major William E. Barker
Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV).
Advisory Board Members (Past and present military personnel)
Edie Disler– PhD, Lt Col (Ret), is a 25 year veteran of the Air Force who served as an ICBM crewmember, an Executive Support Officer to the Secretary of Defense, a conventional arms control inspector, a speechwriter, and USAFA faculty professor.
Robert S. Dotson–Retired Brigadier General.
Robert T. Herres– A Naval Academy graduate with a 36 year career in the United States Air Force, he also served a three-year assignment as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first to hold that position. (December 1, 1932 – July 24, 2008)
Kristen Leslie – An Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Yale Divinity School and consultant to the United States Air Force Academy on religious matters.
Eagle Man, Ed McGaa – Is an enrolled Oglala Sioux tribal member, OST 15287. After serving in Korea, he earned an undergraduate degree from St. Johns University, MN. He then later rejoined the Marine Corps to become a fighter pilot.
Rev. MeLinda Morton – An ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). She is a former Chaplain in the United States Air Force.
George Reed – A faculty member in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego. Before joining the faculty in 2007 he served for 27 years as a military police officer including six as the Director of Command and Leadership Studies at the U.S. Army War College.
AA “Tony” Verrengia  – A retired Air Force Brigadier General, He was a Master Navigator that served in air transport operations positions for many years.
John Whiteside – He is one of only a few military aviators to possess both Senior Command Air Force wings and aircraft carrier qualified Naval Aviator wings, in addition to having been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism in combat during Operation Desert Storm.
Lawrence Wilkerson – Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA. His last position in government was as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff (2002-05).
So, it’s not just Mikey you are calling a POS but the military personnel above that know the laws concerning religion in the military.
We don’t hide “behind pc BS and lies” but stand up for the Separation of Church and State as demanded by the Establishment Clause of the Constitution and Supreme Court laws.
“Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person’s life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the “wall of separation between church and state,” therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.” Thomas Jefferson, to the Virginia Baptists (1808) ME 16:320.
This is his second known use of the term “wall of separation,” here quoting his own use in the Danbury Baptist letter.
This wording of the original was several times upheld by the Supreme Court as an accurate description of the Establishment Clause
.
“Jefferson’s concept of “separation of church and state” first became a part of Establishment Clause jurisprudence in Reynolds v. U.S., 98 U.S. 145 (1878). In that case, the court examined the history of religious liberty in the US, determining that while the constitution guarantees religious freedom, “The word ‘religion’ is not defined in the Constitution. We must go elsewhere, therefore, to ascertain its meaning and nowhere more appropriately, we think, than to the history of the times in the midst of which the provision was adopted.” The court found that the leaders in advocating and formulating the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty were James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Quoting the “separation” paragraph from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, the court concluded that, “coming as this does from an acknowledged leader of the advocates of the measure, it may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the amendment thus secured.
 
In 1878 “separation of church and state” became part of the Establishment Clause BY LAW.
The Supreme Court heard the Lemon v. Kurtzman case in 1971 and ruled in favor of the Establishment Clause.
Subsequent to this decision, the Supreme Court has applied a three-pronged test to determine whether government action comports with the Establishment Clause, known as the Lemon Test:
Government action violates the Establishment Clause unless it:
1. has a significant secular (i.e., non-religious) purpose,
2. does not have the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion
3. does not foster excessive entanglement between government and religion
 Parker v. Levy:
“This Court has long recognized that the military is, by necessity, a specialized society separate from civilian society… While the members of the military are not excluded from the protection granted by the First Amendment, the different character of the military community and of the military mission requires a different application of those protections. … The fundamental necessity for obedience, and the consequent necessity for imposition of discipline, may render permissible within the military that which would be constitutionally impermissible outside it… Speech [in any form] that is protected in the civil population may nonetheless undermine the effectiveness of response to command.  If it does, it is constitutionally unprotected.” (Emphasis added) Parker v. Levy, 417 U.S. 733, 1974
To place the Christian God above all others is in violation of Reynolds v. U.S., Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Lemon Test and Parker v. Levy.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said “We don’t count heads before enforcing the First Amendment.”
This means that though the military is made up of mostly Christians, that don’t mean they have the right to trample the First Amendment rights of the other soldiers.
Lt. Gen. Boykin (ret.) is an Islamophobe, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT, Commander-in-Chief basher, hateful, Dominionist Christian and believes that our military is Christian and all of our wars are holy wars.
The very people he hates are some of the soldiers at Ft. Riley and for him to speak at a Christian prayer breakfast will cause division and hatred on base.
Army Secretary Eric Fanning is the first openly gay leader of any U.S. military branch. While serving in the Obama administration, Fanning has been the acting secretary of the Air Force and deputy undersecretary of the Navy. He also served as special assistant to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
To invite Boykin to speak on an Army base against the Secretary of the Army concerning his gay lifestyle is egregious, against military protocol and against his Civil Rights.
On September 12, 2011 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed and Boykin should not be allowed to drag this back up.
No one here is a coward but we are PC; Pro-Constitution.
Pastor Joan
MRFF Advisory Board Member

Hi (name withheld),

What a silly message.

Cutting through the lowlife dialogue I arrive at the fact that you are a wounded person who thinks Mikey or somebody else here hates Christians. I find it sad that you can somehow arrive at such an asinine conclusion and launch such a transparently stupid attack based on an incorrect assumption. What makes you, apparently a believer in Christ, so thin-skinned? How do you, apparently a follower of Jesus, justify sending a message so full of completely un-Christian words, beliefs and attitudes to someone you don’t know and whose work you don’t understand?

Is it that you doubt your own commitment to Jesus? I do find this ugly behavior to be deeply confusing, and I’ll just bet He does, too.

Give it some thought…

Mike Farrell

(MRFF Board of Advisors)


 

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