When he was a child growing up in Plano, Texas – a place he describes as the “oversized, goofy buckle on the Bible belt” – he would bring his bible to science class and debate his teachers on the finer points of evolution.

“In my head, I won every time,” says Mr Griffith, now 29.

But somewhere along the way, his penchant for picking ideological fights with the non-religious got him in trouble. He found it harder and harder to argue with the points they were making. At 13, he suffered a crisis of faith.

“It was so painful. I lost my religion before I lost my first girlfriend. Nothing that big had ever happened to me, and I didn’t have any coping skills,” he says.

Mr Griffith found peace with his atheism, but he is not done sparring with the opposite team.

As an active-duty sergeant in the US Army, he’s leading the charge to get atheists more respect in the armed forces. In the process he is earning attention, both positive and negative, from around the world…

Click to read article

• It’s a well-known fact that Mikey Weinstein and his Military Religious Freedom Foundation are the bane of the Air Force Academy.
  But is MRFF such an enemy that an academy leader put out the word to run a counter-insurgency against the nonprofit?
  MRFF says it has evidence that, indeed, happened and is demanding the Air Force Secretary Michael Donley order an investigation. Here’s the letter:Click to read letter detailing scandalous plans for “counter-insurgency” operations vs. MRFF, MRFF clients

• In the way of background, Weinstein began his campaign in 2004, alleging the academy favors fundamentalist Christianity. Former Commandant Gen. Johnny Weida taught cadets chants about Jesus, for example. Weinstein has been crying foul ever since on various infractions he and others have perceived of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment of religion clause, i.e., the government can’t dictate what religion you believe in, if any.More recently, we reported in August that AFA superintendent Lt. Gen. Michael Gould wrote in an e-mail that the best course in dealing with e-mails from Weinstein is to “block them from reaching my machine. I’m done with him,” he wrote.In that same report, we quoted AFA professor [and MRFF client] David Mullin, who was a named plaintiff against the academy in a religious freedom case in February, as saying, “They didn’t want to deal with anything having to do with his complaints. He might forward complaints of MRFF clients who were agonizing, and they just blew it off.”

• On Sept. 24, 2010, Weinstein forwarded a message to Dean of Faculty Brig. Gen. Dana Born in which the writer complained the Bible was the only sacred text displayed at an academy prep school prisoner of war display. Born sent the message to others at the academy, saying, “hate to forward these — not worth the time usually you will spend reading it.”After Mullin went public with his criticism, Born didn’t renew his teaching contract. He’s since filed an Equal Employment Opportunity lawsuit.On Dec. 9, 2011, Born was deposed in Mullin’s civil rights lawsuit. Mullin’s attorney, Robert Eye, asked Born if she had ever used the term “counter-insurgency” to describe anything involving the academy.

  “No, sir,” she said.

  The attorney then asked additional questions about use of the term, and Born denied having said it.

• But now, it appears MRFF has proof, in writing, that Born misspoke. Eye, who also represents MRFF, wrote in the letter to Donley:It has come to our attention that, contrary to the sworn testimony of Brig. General Born, she directed, in writing, at least one subordinate, Col. Thomas A. Drohan, Permanent Professor and Head of the Department of Military Strategic Studies, to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign against MRFF and presumably, MRFF clients at the USAFA. We understand that at the direction of Brig. General Born, Col. Drohan’s mid-term performance appraisal specified that he was to conduct a “COIN” against MRFF and its clients. In this context “COIN” is shorthand reference to counterinsurgency.

• He also noted that her identifying MRFF and its clients as COIN targets is “an apparent attempt to chill both speech and assembly rights of MRFF clients” and runs afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition on any “religious test.”Weinstein’s reaction to all this is obviously one of outrage. “We’re talking about perjury,” he says in an interview. “That’s a very serious felony. Can you imagine the fact she put this on his evaluation? A counterinsurgency against my association? Unbelievable.”

Click here to read article

• WASHINGTON — Liberal and religious freedom groups claimed victory on Monday night when Lt. Gen. William Boykin, famous for his strident anti-Muslim speeches, pulled out of a planned Feb. 8th appearance at West Point as part of the National Day of Prayer.
• Boykin is best known for giving explicitly religious speeches while in uniform, telling an audience in 2003 of a Somalian warlord that “I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” Bokyin retired from active duty in 2007 and has continued giving anti-Islam speeches, frequently calling Islam a “totalitarian way of life” and questioning the eligibility of Muslims for protection under the Constitution.
• The scheduled speech also sparked controversy at West Point itself. The academy administration backed Boykin, telling ThinkProgress that they were “comfortable and confident that what retired Lt. Gen. Boykin will share about prayer, soldier care and selfless service, will be in keeping with the broad range of ideas normally considered by our cadets.”
• But a group of cadets and faculty angered by the planned speech held a conference call on Friday night with Mikey Weinstein, head of the the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. One professor, a combat veteran, wrote to Weinstein saying that the invitation was at odds with the Army’s mission of “making it clear that Americans are NOT Christian crusaders who hate Muslims.”
• Weinstein stressed to The Huffington Post that the vast majority of his 101 clients at West Point were practicing Protestants and Catholics. “Most of our clients are Christians being told that they’re not Christian enough,” he said.

Click to read article

Wow. How sad. You show you are not caving in to one religion by by caving in
to two other religions – Islam and Atheism. And then you say you are protecting
religious rights. Shameful…..

(name withheld)

Hi (name withheld),

Rick Baker here. I’m a long time supporter of and volunteer with MRFF, a former Air Force Officer and rescue pilot, having served two combat tours in Vietnam. I say this to qualify my remarks about Gen. Boykin.

MRFF does not consider supporting a religion per se but rather those who practice it in a moderate and constitutional fashion. Gen. Boykin does not practice Christianity in a moderate or constitutional way. He belongs to a maverick sect of Christianity known as Dominion Christianity. You may have heard of this growing sect of militant Christians who claim religious supremacy and world dominance for Jesus Christ.
Gen. Boykin has disgraced his uniform and otherwise outstanding military service by destroying the careers of a number of subordinates who did not see things his way. There is a swath of mowed down young men and women from Vietnam to Mogadishu who fell victim to Boykin’s caustic and aggressive Dominionist proselytizing.

Boykin has appeared at Congressional prayer breakfasts preaching Christian doctrines while in full uniform. That alone was a gross violation of Supreme Court rulings governing religion in the US Military and Government. But then he appeared at Christian churches in uniform calling the United States a “Christian Nation” and Islam the devil’s work.

Now, none of us is really Zippety doo dah with Jihadist Islam, the Taliban or other Muslim extremists. But Boykin, in his remarks, did not take into consideration the large number of American Muslims both civilian and military with honorable records and oaths of loyalty to the American constitution making his remarks ugly and biased.
So while MRFF simply defend those who practice religion in the military in a moderate and constitutional fashion such as the thousands of Muslim and moderate Christians in the armed forces they are required to recognize the good guys. And if observing practitioners of some branch of militant and coercive religion they will come down on them.
The objective is total freedom of religion for all armed forces members with no bias, coercive proselyting or threat.

Mikey Weinstein is an honor graduate of the USAF Academy, ten year veteran of the Judge Advocate’s office in the USAF, an attorney, three years as White House Council to President Reagan and general council to Ross Perot Industries. I can assure you he knows the law.

Rest assured he “caves” to no one.

I invite you to view the MRFF Web Site where much more information about MRFF, its victories in handling over 26,000 client case complaints from our young men and women in the military and testimonials from those whose lives have been made whole again in the armed forces with Mikey’s help.

militaryreligiousfreedom.org

Sincerely,

Rick Baker

I applaud you most emphatically for the tremendous work you do. This country needs to remember that it wasn’t based on Christianity, but freedom of religion. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are fantastic. I am not able to donate right at the present, but should be able to do so within a couple of months. You are wonderful.

(name withheld)

(name withheld)

Dear Mikey,
Today is a great day for because i want to inform that i finally got
the us citizenship , and i would like to thank you MIKEY and the MRFF
for all the efforts that you put into making this happend , i can’t
thank you enough for being there for me 24/7 for moral and financial
support . it means a lot to me after the hardship i went through ,

and i am sure you will be there for every person in the united states
armed forces that needs help and support ,

thank you

(name withheld)

Great job!! I am currently in Vietnam and in Ha Noi, returning after being, here, from 1968-70. I came with the group, “Soldier’s Heart,” and the experience has been both fulfilling and a great lift to my spirit. I spent 18 months, here, as an EOD operator and we have been able to see several places of significance to me that have helped me resolve some things. When we got to the monument in Ha Noi commemorating Jane Fonda’s visit, one of the guys said something very wrong and my response was, “Dude, it has been 41 years since she was here. It no longer matters and she had a right to be here and say the things she said. We were legally not at war with the Vietnamese, it was not treason, so let it go.” Thanks for continuing to fight for all soldiers who are being bombarded with religious bigotry by people like the despicable General Boykin. Several years ago, I think it was May 2004, I attended the EOD Memorial Service at the training facility at Eglin AFB. At the dinner that night to celebrate the lives of our fallen comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan, the keynote speaker was another disgusting Islamophobe, Bud Day, who I am sure you are familiar with. He was also a Swift Boat scumbag. He went on a rant about Muslims and referred to Iraqis and Afghans as “A-rabs” and posited that the simple solution was to nuke the entire area. When I returned home, I wrote a letter of complaint to the CO of the EOD facility and demanded that this piece of shit be reprimanded for his racist comments at the dinner. The people at the school never even wrote me back. There is no doubt in my mind that people like Bud Day were racists when in the service and that he treated all people of color and, no doubt, Jews, with the same bigoted mannerisms. Again, thanks for all of your hard work.

(name withheld)

Monday, January 30, 2012

MRFF Friends and Allies,

This is a monumentally-clear indication that when organizations such as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and VoteVets work toward a common goal, with the strength of our dedicated supporters behind us, concrete positive change can be achieved.

We are deeply saddened that it took a public outcry of this magnitude to cause Boykin to pull out from this event, likely under pressure from within the Pentagon. Our outcry must not stop – all individuals within the command structure responsible for inviting this vile Islamophobe must be held accountable via courts martial.

On behalf of every single serviceman and servicewoman that we represent, and especially our 101 clients at West Point, we thank you so much for your continued support. Please read the powerful email below that we just received from one of our anonymous West Point Faculty clients.

This is truly a momentous victory for the Constitution, and you’re responsible for it.

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Esq.
Founder & President
Military Religious Freedom Foundation

January 27, 2012

John McHugh
Secretary of the Army
101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) unequivocally condemns the outrageous and scandalous decision to invite the rabidly Islamophobic retired Lieutenant General William Boykin to speak before the National Prayer Breakfast at the United States Military Academy at West Point. The event, which is scheduled to occur on February 8, 2012, must not be used as a forum for the backwards and disgusting hate speech of virulent anti-Muslim extremists such as retired Lt. Gen. Boykin. Our civil rights foundation demands that the Pentagon rescind its invitation to this notorious and noxious fundamentalist Christian supremacist immediately and without delay.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation represents over 26,000 aggrieved soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, cadets, midshipmen, and armed forces veteran clients, 96% of whom are Christian. This outrageous invitation to Boykin stands as a shameful testament to the fact that the ranks of the U.S. military have been possessed and inundated by the dangerous national security threat of evangelical fundamentalist fanaticism which Boykin represents, with grave consequences for servicemembers’ morale. In 2010, this travesty was made abundantly clear by the fact that another infamous, unapologetic Islamophobe, Franklin Graham, was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer event. Then, as now, we at MRFF immediately cited the heinously illicit and inappropriate nature of such an endorsement by military officials and effusively called for the Department of Defense to distance itself from its affiliation with bigots and bullies such as Graham, or face the immediacy of pending, aggressive Federal Court litigation.

At West Point alone, MRFF represents 27 faculty members and 74 cadets on this very matter of Boykin’s invitation; all but 7 of these West Point MRFF clients are either Protestant or Roman Catholic. The scandalous invitation to Boykin is but one symptom of a much broader affliction which has struck the once-prestigious institutes of higher learning within the U.S. Armed Forces – and indeed, the entirety of our once-secular American military. Today’s military is regrettably being transformed into a stomping ground for fundamentalist, Bible-thumping charlatans who have created an intolerable and wholly unconstitutional climate of religious oppression and tyranny for fellow members.

First and foremost, the invitation to Boykin represents a cruel insult to the thousands of honorable Muslim-Americans serving in the U.S. military and a desecration of the memory of those pristinely loyal and patriotic American soldiers of the Muslim faith who have fallen in battle or who have suffered injury in their service to this country. The galling and disingenuous claims that Boykin is being invited in the interests of “Pluralism” and “broadening intellectual horizons” simply don’t merit even the most cursory consideration. Instead, it is obvious that his views fan the flames of vulgar and pernicious religious discrimination and profound ignorance. Boykin himself is an outspoken and unabashed representative of the lunatic fringe of anti-Muslim hysteria. Additionally, Boykin’s feverish brand of fundamentalist Christian militarism is ingrained with a virulent theological hostility towards the cherished blessings of democracy and religious freedom, as embodied and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, which generations of service members have shed precious blood to protect.

According to a West Point faculty member and MRFF client who wishes to remain anonymous, “though it violates our United States Constitution and the sworn oaths we all took to support and defend it, West Point has an ‘official religion’ and it’s evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity. And THAT is precisely why this prejudiced racist Boykin has been invited to disgrace our Academy with his Islamophobic filth at this religious event.”

The faculty member continued: “Suffice it to say that the horrible consequences of the prejudiced message sent ’round-the-world by this official West Point invitation to Boykin is all but incalculable. The true price to be exacted, by granting this high profile speaking engagement to the bigot Boykin, will shamefully be paid in blood, and the blood of innocents. The President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the most senior U.S. Army leadership have made it absolutely imperative to win the hearts and minds of our Islamic allies, and potential allies, by making it clear that Americans are NOT Christian crusaders who hate Muslims.”

Click here for the full text of the letter from this anonymous West Point faculty member

Indeed, the invitation to Boykin comes mere days after President Barack Obama, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, issued his State of the Union Address where it was noted that the guiding principle of American policy both foreign and domestic would be to “stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings – men and women; Christians, Muslims and Jews. ” The brazenly counter-intuitive extension of this invitation to Boykin can only be viewed as a seditious attempt to undermine the stated policy of the present administration as well as the critical ongoing efforts to “reset” relations with the Muslim world.

It is absolutely no exaggeration to say that the militant evangelical/fundamentalist Christian fanaticism that Boykin represents mirrors the militant Wahhabi-jihadist extremism of those whom the U.S. military is fighting in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation stands alongside the constituencies of our 101 clients at West Point, the patient and honorable community of Muslim-American armed forces members, and all democratically-minded military service personnel in demanding that the West Point National Prayer Breakfast be an event which is welcoming and inclusive to all members of the Academy’s faculty, staff, and Corps of Cadets. In this spirit, we repeat our demand that Boykin’s invitation immediately be revoked. Boykin and his fellow evangelists of putrescent fundamentalist religious bigotry must not use the United States Military Academy at West Point as a venue for ignorant, racist displays of sectarian hatred and disgusting religious supremacy and exceptionalism.

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Esq.
Founder & President
Military Religious Freedom Foundation

CC:
President Barack Obama
Leon E. Panetta – Secretary, Department of Defense
General Raymond T. Odierno – Army Chief of Staff
General Martin E. Dempsey – Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
General James A. Winnefeld, Jr. – Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Lieutenant General David H. Huntoon, Jr. – Superintendent, U.S. Military Academy, West Point