MIKEY’s OP-ED – Of DOMA, Defense, Duplicity, and Diligence

Selected Article Excerpts:

• Let freedom ring! It rang so loudly and clearly on June 26, 2013 at this nation’s Supreme Court. It sounded a death knell for blatant oppressors… the Supreme Court’s watershed June 26 decision striking down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is a resounding victory for the nation, the armed forces, and the United States Constitution itself.
• MRFF has long worked closely with our lesbian, gay, and bisexual allies in uniform. 801 of our over 33,600 clients are from the LGB community alone. Each of these clients has recounted to us in vivid detail their own personal trials and tribulations, depicting a hideous and tragic panorama of collective suffering that has savagely afflicted a grievously oppressed community within the armed forces.

• Under the perniciously cruel “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) regime of enforced “closeting” (read: lying), LGB servicemembers were forced to live a mandated “dual existence,” separating their military careers from a Pentagon-mandated, fictitious personal life of lies. The already Promethean challenges of military life were exponentially compounded by the profound anxieties borne of constantly dwelling in the trembling shadows of innocent and undeserved shame. Uncle Sam literally pointed a big, condemnatory finger at some of our bravest and most valiant men and women in uniform and told them that, despite sacrificing far, far more than the amount of fortitude expected of their fellow servicemembers, they’d still better “shut the hell up” or they’d be ignominiously and summarily booted out of the U.S. armed forces.

• However, the Chaplain Corps of the armed forces’ respective service branches have long been a stronghold of fundamentalist Christian supremacy, inveterate conservatism, and essentially universal anti-gay bigotry. Indeed, enormous swaths of the United States military chaplaincy have been allowed to abuse their purely secular role as commissioned military officers. Instead of ensuring the free expression of religion within the military and serving the needs of all faiths, denominations, and persuasions, these chaplains have aimed to transform their commission into a nefarious, sectarian enterprise.

• Arch-hypocritical fundamentalist Christian extremists such as Col. Ron Crews (USAR-Ret.), executive director for the wretchedly-named Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL), have been at the vanguard of defending the unchecked “privileges” of these tyrannical chaplains. Their main complaints are disingenuous in extremis. Try not to burst out laughing now. They scream like stuck pigs that their “religious liberty” is under attack.

• A perfect example of the hijack-and-subvert tactics undertaken by fundamentalist Christian chaplains comes in the form of the U.S. Army’s “Strong Bonds” program. Strong Bonds, a program of weekend retreats for “individual resiliency” and “strengthening the Army Family,” is not supposed to be a religious program, although it is wholly (holy?) run by the Chaplain Corps. However, loopholes within the program have allowed reprobate chaplains to commandeer it, regularly turning this so-called “non-religious” program’s weekend events into carefully crafted and choreographed evangelical retreats of Christian supremacy, triumphalism, and exceptionalism. Totally unsuspecting and ill-prepared military family participants are liberally inundated with stacks of evangelical Christian books and literature the very minute they arrive. Further, the “entertainment” is usually provided by evangelical Christian performers/profiteers cum carpetbaggers and the retreat sites are often clearly sectarian Christian campgrounds or resorts.

• Following the sounding of the death knell for DOMA, Crews complained, “Chaplains have been protected by DOMA as they minister to service members and their families in a manner consistent with those sincerely held beliefs. That freedom is now at significant risk.” Oh my. There is a word for that: “chutzpah.”Crews topped his sour grapes, ridiculous, and baseless tantrum with an especially curdled bit of cream: an endorsement of a raft of faux “religious liberty” amendments to 2014’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), introduced by his fellow Constitutionally-irresponsible ilk who hold elected legislative office in Washington. These amendments are guaranteed to destroy good order, morale, and discipline within the armed forces. In point of fact, they create a virtual “license to kill” by allowing for and legally sanctioning the unrestricted ability of personnel (including chaplains) to persecute, harass, and discriminate against servicemembers on the grounds of religion, gender, and sexual orientation.
• History ominously reminds and instructs us that Southern white supremacists were able to hang up their KKK regalia and go underground, become “respectable,” and advance their racist agenda through legislative and other institutional means (see Jim Crow et al.). So, too, will the Christian fundamentalist extremists most assuredly use similarly devious methods to push their own horrendously bigoted docket. It’s as sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The NDAA “religious liberty” amendment campaign is but one among various mendacious methods by which these fundamentalist bullies will launch asymmetric countermeasures in their transparently desperate attempts to attack the precious freedoms borne from the repeals of DADT and DOMA.
  

Click to read article at Alternet

Click to read article at Huffington Post