Michael “Mikey” Weinstein is trying to make significant waves over the continued practice of US Air Force Academy football players taking a knee in the end zone prior to the start of their games. He has famously called the practice “putrid” and a

monstrous travesty and brutal breach of federal constitutional law…

Weinstein’s group has even categorically said these football players are Christians (how he knows that, no one knows) — and that they sound “like the Taliban…or worse.”

Oddly, even though West Point and the Naval Academy do exactly the same thing, Weinstein has declined to similarly malign those cadets and midshipmen.

Worse, Weinstein and his group have lambasted a few Air Force football players for silently taking a knee before their game while wearing their pads…

…while completely ignoring the thousands of cadets who were in military uniform and bowed their heads in prayer during the invocation given at this year’s Army-Navy game — in which US Army Chaplain (Col) Matthew Pawlikowski prayed, on national TV, to “Almighty God” for the officer candidates who would soon “visit violence…on the enemies of the world.”  You can watch the inspiring message here:

Presumably, Weinstein stands behind his statement that there aren’t any problems at West Point because he’s friends with LtGen Robert Caslen. And the chaplain’s prayer must have been acceptable because Chaplain Pawlikowski is Catholic, therefore he can’t be an “evangelical Christian” with whom Mikey Weinstein is in a self-declared “war.”

More accurately, Weinstein probably can’t highlight the other Academies lest he lose face and (fake) ammunition. Weinstein gets traction by implying USAFA is a one-off deviant in its illegal/unconstitutional “Christ-filled” culture, a meme his supporters are only to happy to announce is due to USAFA’s proximity to Focus on the Family and New Life Church in Colorado Springs.

But if the practice is normal to all the service academies — including one on the outskirts of New York City, hardly a bastion of Christian conservatism — it suddenly becomes harder to justify banning it.

And that’s the bottom line: Mikey Weinstein wants the government to prohibit people from praying.

In truth, no one really needs an explanation of why that’s wrong.

Fortunately, with the encouragement of some religious liberty advocates, the US Air Force Academy rebuffed Weinstein’s demands, and religious freedom has prevailed.

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