Go get them Senator

Hopefully the Senator will get to the bottom of this and hopefully expose your organization for what it is, a liberal activist group with a dangerous agenda.

(names withheld)

Wicker: I’ll get answers on Pentagon’s ‘proselytization’ policy
Posted by Chad Groening (American Family News) – May 03, 2013
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A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee intends to get some straight answers from the Pentagon about comments by a Defense Department official related to religious proselytization in the military.

Earlier this week, Navy Commander Nate Christensen issued a statement on behalf of the Pentagon that said: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense” and that “court-martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case by case basis.”

But on Thursday, after Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a Freedom of Information Act request, Christensen backtracked, saying: “Service members can share their faith (evangelize) but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one’s beliefs (proselytization).”

Senator Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) is a retired Air Force JAG officer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He tells American Family News that he intends to get some answers.

“I’m asking for them to define what they view as proper, acceptable evangelizing and how that differs from proselytizing,” he says. “So we’ll get an answer to that.”

According to the GOP lawmaker, this is not an isolated incident but what he sees as a pattern of anti-Christian sentiment that comes from the top. He remembers listening to the president during a visit to the White House one Christmas.

“He just couldn’t say the word ‘Christmas’ – the word just didn’t come out of his mouth. He finally mumbled out about ‘the holiday,’” shares Wicker. “So he has a lot of difficulty in feeling comfortable with the religious heritage of this country.”

The senator says he intends to sound the alarm at the Armed Services Committee about this policy.

In its FOIA request, ADF stated it is “troubled” by the statements coming out of the Pentagon:

“A ban on military personnel sharing their faith with others not only infringes the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, it infringes free speech rights as well. We do not believe the United States Military can possibly justify this infringement. We further find it appalling and unacceptable that our Nation’s military seeks to deny its soldiers the very freedoms it asks them to defend.”

Dear (name withheld),

I hope the senator gets to the bottom of our agenda and exposes us to the world for what we really are. That would be ideal, really, because we really are exactly what we say we are: an organization of patriotic Americans who believe the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion does not stop after giving an oath of allegiance. The article you’ve included in your e-mail is quite misleading, and has probably led you to believe that we have some desire to eradicate faith. That is not in any way whatsoever even an approximation of the true mission of the MRFF. We do what we say, and we say we defend the rights of all Americans in uniform to practice their religion, free of religious coercion.

Cheers,

Blake A. Page
Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Special Assistant to the President
Director of West Point Affairs