just found out about your group

i just found your web page, and several articles on the web, and i must say, i am impressed. you have taken misreading constitutional law to an entirely new level. might i point out, we are to interpret the law based on what the founding fathers wanted, not on some misguided pretext of helping people.
you hide hate and intolerance in platitudes of “helping fight bigotry” well the thing is, what you have missed is the point behind the separation of church and state. when the law was written the king of England was the head of the church. the entire point behind it was to keep the government at large, and people like yourself, out of religion.
i am friends with Jews, pagans, wickins, straights, and gays, and all any of us et from your site, your law suites, is hate speech. color it any way you want, but you preach, practice, live bigotry.
you are the two faced bigot type who scream loud and often that every person has a right to their belief, their opinion, as long as its the same as yours. not much different then extremist groups from the KKK, to the jihadist.
I know that no one will answer this, and that’s fine, hell i don’t think you’ll even read the whole thing. but understand something, religious freedom means, just that freedom, where you people get off deciding whats right, and whats fair for the rest of the country is beyond me. it would be different if you knew what you were talking about, or cared about anything other than shoving your opinions and beliefs on every one else. just like the people you claim your trying to stop. i am amazed at the ego, self serving bile i have seen
(name withheld)

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Dear (name withheld),

Your sentiments, mixed as they are with your typos, suggest that you either have not done the research you claim or that you viewed it all through hate-colored glasses or that you are lying. It’s honestly hard to tell which. On behalf of Mikey Weinstein and all the good folks at MRFF, I am happy to respond to your email, just the same.

Here are a few important corrections: MRFF has protected the rights of every class of individual you’ve named, particularly those you listed among your friends, because they have been attacked or threatened, or their families have been mistreated, on grounds of an extremist mentality which hides behind the guise of Christianity and is better known as Dominionist or Dominionist Christianity.

Now, I suggest you look that up and, while you’re at it, look up “Seven Mountains”, the essential targets of Dominionists, so you can understand what is really going on and where you really stand…

… because if you stand with them, just to stand against MRFF, then you also stand against all those friends you mentioned.

Sincerely,
A former USAF veteran and staunch MRFF supporter

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Dear (name withheld),

Rick Baker here. I’m a former USAF Officer and Rescue Pilot, having served two combat tours in Vietnam. I am also a volunteer for MRFF.

For some time members of a militant Christian Sect known as “Dominion Christians” have attempted to employ coercive and command centered Christian proselytizing to our young men and women in the military. We know this because we are currently addressing over 35,000 complaints citing such illegal and unconstitutional activity from these young men and women.

Our reliance on the Constitution is primarily in the area of Separation of Church and State. It is our goal to intercede for any military member who is or has been subject to such proselytizing. MRFF will intercede the coercive proselytizing of any religion.

So you see, we are not against Christianity or any religion only those who would attempt to force their beliefs on others.

You sound like you would be a great addition to our group.

Rick Baker
Capt. USAF (Ret)
MRFF Volunteer

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Dear (name withheld),

Surprise! We read the whole thing and are answering you!

Mikey has read your email and asked me to respond to you as he is very busy trying to help our soldiers keep their freedom to practice their religious or non-religious belief
guaranteed to them under our Constitution.

You obviously did not dig deep enough in our website so I will inform you as to how we operate.

Mikey – who is an agnostic Jew – is the face and Founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) but Mikey does not work alone. There is the Board, Advisory Board, volunteers and supporters of which 75% are Christians. A full 96% of our clients are Christians which makes us the biggest supporter for the rights of Christians in the military.

We DO NOT act on our own but on the request of our soldiers who are facing religious persecution (mainly to CHRISTIANS) from their military superiors and peers. Each complaint must be vetted before taking any action by Mikey who was a US Air Force JAG for 10 years and he also spent over three years in the West Wing of the Reagan Administration as legal counsel in the White House. He is no dummy when it comes to the laws of the United States.

So, it seems, you are taking out your hostilities on the wrong person. I suggest you pen an email to the Stars and Stripes and let the soldiers know how you feel.

You wrote:

what you have missed is the point behind the separation of church and state. when the law was written the king of England was the head of the church. the entire point behind it was to keep the government at large, and people like yourself, out of religion.

You obviously have no clue on the history of America.

In 1767, the British Parliament began passing a series of acts called the Townsend Acts. The purpose of the Townshend Acts was to raise revenue in the colonies to pay the salaries of governors and judges so that they would remain loyal to Great Britain, to create a more effective means of enforcing compliance with trade regulations, to punish the province of New York for failing to comply with the 1765 Quartering Act, and to establish the precedent that the British Parliament had the right to tax the colonies. The Townshend Acts were met with resistance in the colonies, prompting the occupation of Boston by British troops in 1768, which eventually resulted in the Boston Massacre of 1770.Then there was the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773 which lead to the start of the American Revolution in 1775. By spring 1776 the Patriots had seized full control in all thirteen colonies and on July 4, 1776, their Continental Congress declared independence.

The Declaration of Independence FROM British rule was ratified on July 4, 1776.

Britain recognized the independence of the United States following their defeat and surrender at the battle of Saratoga and signed a peace treaty – better known as the Treaty of Paris in 1783 – thus ending the Revolutionary War between the British and Americans.

The Constitution was ratified June 21, 1788, when the King of England no longer had control over the colonies. To state that he had any impact on our laws shows your ignorance of history.

The Treaty of Tripoli was signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796.It was submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, receiving ratification unanimously from the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797, and signed by Adams, taking effect as the law of the land on June 10, 1797; a mere 8 years since our Constitution went into effect. If what was written was wrong in anyway, there would have been uproar. But, it passed unanimously and confirmed that America was not founded on Christianity.

Treaty of Tripoli:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

If what was written here was wrong in anyway, there would have been uproar. But, it passed unanimously and confirmed that America was not founded on Christianity.

As for the separation of Church and State not existing in the Constitution, the words may not exist, but the idea is there and those words were used by some of the founding fathers.

Religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together. – James Madison Letter to Edward Livingston (1822-07-10)

“Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” Thomas Jefferson – Virginia Act for Religious Freedom

“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.” James Madison

“A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.” Federalist Papers #10

The Puritans tried to start a Theocracy here but it failed miserably.

“More than once it has been said, too, that the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered.” George Lincoln Burr (January 30, 1857 – 1938) Professor of History and Librarian at Cornell University

“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.”

The Supreme Court heard the Lemon v. Kurtzman 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”

Lemon Test:

1. Any law or policy must have been adopted with a neutral or non-religious purpose.

2. The principle or primary effect of any law or policy must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

3. The statute or policy must not result in an “excessive entanglement” of government with religion.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (Establishment Clause) …”

Note that the clause is absolute. It allows no law. It is also noteworthy that the clause forbids more than the establishment of religion by the government. It forbids even laws respecting an establishment of religion.

“. . . no religious test (Free Exercise Clause) shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” (Article VI, Section III)

You do see that the Establishment Clause comes before the Free Exercise Clause? That’s because the Free Exercise Clause is subservient to the Establishment Clause.

Our military is a government entity and must remain secular. Any person that wants to don the uniform of a branch of our military is free to do so with the express admonition from the Constitution to not exalt one religion over another.

We are not trying to rid our military of Christianity. What we are trying to stop is an extreme form of Christianity (better known as the Evangelical/Fundamental/Dominionists) that believes they are the only true form of it and all other mainline Christians are not of the “right kind” and going to hell. They are attempting to turn our soldiers into “Warriors for Christ” and that every war is a Crusade. They teach that they are to cleanse the world of all the wrong kind of Christians, those of other religions and those not practicing any faith, in order for Jesus to come back and reign for 1,000 years. This thinking throws out the entire book of Revelations where Jesus comes back with His ‘heavenly army” to conquer the world. Jesus never asked for an army on earth. He said “Blessed are the peacekeepers” not “Blessed are the warmongers.”

This extreme form of Christianity is relentless in its in-your-face religious proselytizing to other soldiers by the military personnel all the way up to the Commander. They have usurped the office of the Chaplains. They have harassed, beaten, withheld advancements and drummed soldiers out of the military on trumped up charges, all in the name of Jesus. They believe in cleansing the military of all of those that do not believe in the sect they do.

US Army chaplain MAJ James Linzey, who, in a 1999 video, described mainstream Protestant churches as “demonic, dastardly creatures from the pit of hell “that should be “stomped out.”

Are you of this belief?

We fight for the separation of Church and State in our military – a government entity – under our Constitution.

We are not against what civilians do or as you stated:

where you people get off deciding whats right, and whats fair for the rest of the country is beyond me.

For the rest of the country? I have no idea where you came up with this unless someone said this to you as fact or your imagination made it up.

Your email has to be one of dumbest emails we have ever received.

Where did you get your education on the history of America?

I will close with your last sentence:

i am amazed at the ego(ignorance, illiteracy), self serving (self-righteous) bile (lies, distortions and projections)) i have seen (written in this email).

Pastor Joan

MRFF Advisory Board Member

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Hi (name withheld),

What is (name withheld)? That’s an intriguing handle.

I’m a bit confused by your message, so I hope you can help me better understand it. Mikey, by the way, is pretty tied up protecting the religious freedom of the women and men in the military, so I try to help out by responding to messages when I can.

Per part of your own message, please know we always read what comes our way. All of it. And, as you might imagine, some of it is pretty dreadful. Actually, I guess you don’t have to imagine it because if you’ve visited the MRFF website as you’ve suggested here you’ve had the chance to see some of it.

Anyway, as said, you’ve confused me. How is it you think we are misreading Constitutional law? Is there something about the separation of church and state we’ve missed?

When you are so kind as to point out that “we are to interpret the law based on what the founding fathers wanted,” you sound a bit like Antonin Scalia, whose “originalist” approach is firmly held by him personally, but hasn’t yet won the support of either a majority of the court or the country’s leading legal thinkers. And your added phrase about “some misguided pretext of helping people” makes me wonder just what, in your mind, the purpose of the Constitution might be?

I find myself wondering how Scalia thinks he knows exactly what the founders were thinking at that time. And now, if you’re a Scalia devotee, maybe I can find out. On that score, are you familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding on “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”? I suspect that must give Scalia fits.

Because you mention the founding fathers, you’re probably aware of the struggles for religious freedom that took place in this country from its very earliest days. Banning this, allowing that, burning “witches,” the Maryland Tolerance Act, the Protestant Revolution. Fortunately we had leaders with foresight, like the very religious Baptist Roger Williams, who said, “strict separation of church and state has to be kept.” And of course Thomas Jefferson, who wrote of building “a wall of separation between church and state.”

But I’d like to better understand what it is that makes you assert that we “hide hate and intolerance in platitudes of helping fight bigotry.” Where is it hidden? I ask because I’m unaware of any hate and intolerance on the part of the people I’m familiar with at the MRFF. Well, to be fair, most of us are intolerant of bigotry, but I suspect that’s not the kind of intolerance you’re talking about. Or is it?

You suggest what we’ve missed is that the “point behind the separation of church and state” is law, written under King George, and its purpose was “to keep the government at large, and people like yourself, out of religion.” I’m not sure, here, exactly what law you’re talking about. Nor am I sure what you mean when you make reference to it.

If you’re saying that’s the point of King George’s law, we weren’t operating under King George’s law when the Constitution was written, remember? We’d had a war and separated from England. But if you mean it’s the point of our law, the “establishment clause” of the First Amendment, we’re in agreement. The point of the law was to keep government out of the business of religion. Now, you’ve added ‘”and people like yourself” to suggest something, but I’m not clear just what. Do you think we are promoting a religion? We’re certainly not doing that, as I would think you’d have clearly understood if you have, as you claim, visited our website.

No, all we’re doing is seeing to it that the government – and the military is part of our government – does not get into the business of promoting, or appearing to promote, one religious belief over another. That’s it. That’s the whole kit and caboodle.

So what is it you don’t understand about that?

You claim to have friends of different belief systems and different lifestyles and assert that “all any of us et (sic) from your site, your law suites (sic), is hate speech.” Forgive me, but that’s crazy. You’ll certainly see some pretty strong statements opposing forced proselytizing, particularly by fundamentalist or “dominionist” Christians who are the biggest offenders, but the consistent position articulated by the MRFF is that anyone is welcome to her or his belief or non-belief, but the government, in this case the military, cannot be in the position of supporting, sponsoring or promoting one belief over another. Period.

As to your notion that we are promoting our own particular belief system, I’m trying not to laugh, but please tell me what that might be. Our staff and members or supporters represent a broad array of beliefs, some of them clergy of a particular faith, some of them committed to a specific church, mosque, temple or other place of worship, some of them with a somewhat amorphous belief system, some of them non-believers. All are committed to supporting people’s freedom to believe as they choose and for the government to stay out of it.

So what’s your beef, Scott? We agree that freedom means freedom. We haven’t decided “what’s right, and what’s fair for the rest of the country,” the framers of the Constitution did that. All we want is for the military to obey the law and honor the separation of church and state.

Hope to hear from you.

Best,

Mike Farrell
(MRFF Board of Advisors)

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Good Day, (name withheld)-

Thanks for writing to MRFF to express your concerns. While you seem certain that no one will reply to you or even read your entire note, you are wrong on both counts. Every email that MRFF receives is read by multiple people including our Big Toe, Mikey Weinstein. He has asked me to reply to you, which I’m happy to do because it is clear to me that you hold misconceptions about several things. So if you are amenable to some feedback, I’d like to point out a few things for you to consider. And if you are interested in further discussion/debate, I’m happy to continue our dialogue after you’ve read my response.

First off, I’m curious to know where you see examples of bigotry at the MRFF website. The only place that I see it is in the ‘Inbox’ section, where many examples of bigotry can be seen in the hateful emails from purported Christians who make vile threats, pray for disease and pestilence, pray for the eternal damnation of those with whom they disagree, and generally act in a way that I’m sure makes Jesus weep. And believe me, I am not in any way anti-Christian because I’m a Christian myself, as are many of MRFF’s supporters and clients. But in my view, the hateful people who send these poisonous emails are not worshiping the same God that I worship. In fact, I’d argue that it is these people who more closely resemble the “extremist groups” that you mention in your email.

You say that you believe MRFF is “the two faced bigot type who scream loud and often that every person has a right to their belief, their opinion, as long as its the same as yours.” I gotta say, I’m left to think that you have not read anything at the MRFF website very closely — or perhaps you are getting your information from other sources like Fox News, in which case you have been fed a line of malarkey. MRFF does not promote any particular sectarian belief or non-belief — on the contrary, we are in favor of the Constitutional protection of people of every sectarian belief. We will fight for the Constitutional rights of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Free Thinkers, Atheists, Agnostics, Hindus, Wiccans, Druids, Rastafarians, Zoroastrians, or literally any other belief or non-belief of which you can conceive — we believe that EVERY ONE is entitled to the full protection of the US Constitution.

So to suggest that MRFF is bigoted and promoting some sort of specific sectarian belief is simply wrong.

I’d also ask you to reconsider your comment that “we are to interpret the law based on what the founding fathers wanted.” That is only partly true. The American tradition of maintaining the US Constitution as a living document, something that is done primarily through our courts, interprets those words to ensure they are still protecting Americans today, in a much different country than the one in which the founding fathers lived. A great example of this is the Second Amendment. If we limit our interpretation to what the founding fathers said, then we need to limit our perspective on gun rights to those that relate to a well-regulated militia and its role in maintaining the security of a free State. But as I’m sure you know, our courts have expanded their interpretation in the past 200-plus years such that it now recognizes that those rights vest in individuals, not just militias, and also that those rights are not limitless (although the plain text does not suggest any limits).

Same is true with the First Amendment. At the time of our nation’s founding, there was great concern about avoiding the sort of State-legislated religion from which some of the colonists had fled in Europe. As well, it’s important to note that, at least among the free people in the early colonies, there was much greater homogeneity in terms of religious belief than we have today. So over the past 200-plus years, the interpretation of what is meant by each of the two parts of the First Amendment – no establishment of religion and no prohibition on the free exercise of religion – has developed in order to continue to provide appropriate protection to what is now an incredibly diverse, multicultural society with a wide range of beliefs, including non-belief. Every American, regardless of his individual belief or non-belief, is equally entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment.

In light of this background, what is the mission of MRFF? We are dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

I don’t know if you have a military background – I am an Air Force veteran. As noted in the Mission Statement I just provided, MRFF’s focus is on the military. If you do have a military background, then you know how rigid is its structure and hierarchy — leaders have a huge amount of power and control over subordinates. There is really no example in the civilian world that compares — military leaders can literally order subordinates to do things that are likely to get them killed, and the subordinates must follow those orders.

In that environment, the potential for leaders to misuse their authority should not be dismissed lightly. One of those areas of potential abuse is religion. Every military member, including every leader, is entitled to freely practice religion however he sees fit (including the right to non-belief). At the same time, no military member has a right to use his position to promote a particular religious belief to those under his authority. THAT is the core of what we do at MRFF. To ensure that no military member is subjected to inappropriate proselytizing or the promotion of sectarian beliefs by those who are higher in the command structure. And that effort is entirely consistent with the way our courts have ruled on First Amendment issues for decades.

Unfortunately, there are some deeply religious people who believe it is their right, even their calling, to spread their beliefs at all times and to all people. That becomes a problem when they do it in a military environment, where subordinates don’t have the ability to easily resist or decline that sort of sectarian pressure. As long as there are people trying to do that, there is a need for an organization like MRFF to speak on behalf of military members who can’t always speak for themselves.

Hopefully, this information is helpful to you. In closing, I should also tell you that my first encounter with MRFF was from the perspective of being watchful and critical. I only knew what others were saying about MRFF, and as a Christian and AF veteran I was inclined to stand opposed to what I believed at the time to be meddling — frankly, a position probably not too far what where you are today. I also wrote an email to MRFF expressing my concerns, and then I set about to get myself educated on the topic of First Amendment rights and also what MRFF was actually about. When I was done, I was convinced that the fight in which MRFF finds itself is a righteous one, and also that Mikey Weinstein who gets a lot of grief from critics, is a good and honorable man. I strongly encourage you to do similar research of your own – I believe that if you do, you will come to the same conclusion that I did

Thanks again for writing. As I said at the opening, I’m happy to discuss any of these issues further. I’m a volunteer who does this because I think it’s an important mission, and I’d welcome the opportunity to hear your thoughts about what I’ve shared in this note.

Peace,

Mike Challman

Christian, AF Veteran, MRFF Supporter