Tag Archives: dustin chalker

Activists Call for End to West Point Prayers

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has called on the US Military Academy at West Point to “stop including prayer during official events.”

In a letter to Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. David H. Huntoon and other officials, Americans United asserted that the academy’s prayer policy runs afoul of the Constitution and violates the rights of cadets.

West Point responded simply by saying there are no mandatory prayers at the Academy.  Americans United seems to believe the First Amendment was written to protect offended ears, not speech.  Their letter supports — unwittingly or not — the stereotype that merely being exposed to a ‘religious act’ is offensive and therefore illegal [emphasis added]:  Read more

Rush Limbaugh and the Petition of American Military Atheists

The Air Force Times recently admitted to letting the “news” slip by without reporting it.  After checking the White House “We the People” petition website (to view the White House beer recipe), an astute reporter noticed that the White House had responded to a petition to pull Rush Limbaugh off AFN, the worldwide DoD radio and TV broadcast system.  That is, the White House responded in July.  From the AFTimes:

[The petition] threshold for a reply was 25,000 people — a level reached in April — but the reply wasn’t posted until July and got scant Read more

Top 2011 Articles: Happy New Year from ChristianFighterPilot.com

Have a productive and joyful 2012.

The Top 10 articles from God and Country in 2011:

  1. Fort Carson Supports Native American Spiritualism
  2. “Terror Plot” Soldier Naser Abdo Defiant, Weinstein Equivocates
  3. MRFF Petition Garners Signatures for White House
  4. US Army Private Naser Abdo Arrested in Terror Plot
  5. DADT: House Defense Bill, Colonels Punished, Lawsuit and More
  6. Finding a Church, Part 1: The Military Chapel
  7. Atheists Stretch for Something to be Offended By
  8. Navy Blue Angels Commander Resigns over Incident
  9. Women in the Military: Statistics, and the First Female JFACC
  10. Defense Department Highlights Member-Designated Benefits

While those were the top 10 current events articles in 2011, they were not the top-visited pages on the site.  As noted Read more

Military Atheists Respond: Dustin Chalker and the Facts

It seems the prior article on the White House petition to “end discrimination” against military atheists struck a chord, most notably with its creator, Dustin Chalker.

Chalker posted a response to the article with his MRFF ally Chris Rodda as an independent blog.  Not all of the assumptions Rodda and Chalker made were necessarily accurate, but the response here, as some have seen, has been interesting.  Most who have commented failed to actually read the story behind any of Chalker’s accusations, making such deep and thoughtful statements as “You’re a coward” easy, if logically unsupported, diatribes to make in their passionate support of Chalker.

Though he never indicated so himself, Rodda claims Dustin Chalker – who sued the Department of Defense as an Army Sergeant – is now the civilian “Mr.” Chalker, though she contradictorily uses his rank in the present tense.

Both Rodda’s and Chalker’s comments contained factual errors, though accuracy has never been Rodda’s strong suit.  Some of the more salient points of Chalker’s comment are below:

Chalker said it was “lying” to say his lawsuit  Read more

Army Atheists Get it Wrong on Chaplains. Again.

The “military director” of American Atheists and coordinator for “Rock Beyond Belief” at Fort Bragg, Justin Griffith, previously misstepped when he tried to ‘humorously’ make the point “there are no chaplains in foxholes.’  (Even some who support him have asked him not to demean the service of chaplains who died in the line of duty or received such accolades as the Medal of Honor.)

Griffith was also so offended by an answer BrigGen Rhonda Cornum gave in a media interview that he misquoted her and allowed another military atheist, Dustin Chalker, to rail on about her misquoted statement.

Now, he’s done it again.

This time Griffith targeted Read more

MRFF Petition Garners Signatures for White House

Dustin Chalker, an Army Sergeant and MRFF “client,” publicly announced that he started a petition on the whitehouse.gov “We the People” website calling for an “End [to] the Military’s Discrimination against Non-Religious Service Members.”

The petition wording reflects some of the sentiment behind Chalker’s failed lawsuit against the Army — a lawsuit that was tossed out because Chalker failed to use the internal grievance systems the Army has in place.  The petition contains similarly vague claims of illegal conduct, which are (still) unsupported to date by any public facts:  Read more

Military Atheists and “Higher” Things…or Not

ABC News recently did a short segment on the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, or, more accurately, the spiritual fitness portion of it.

They interviewed Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, a PhD, MD, Desert Storm POW, and current Director of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness in the Army.

They also interviewed US Army Sgt Dustin Chalker, an atheist Soldier whom Michael Weinstein used to sue the US Army.  (The lawsuit was dismissed.)

While military atheists have generally taken issue with the entire concept of “spiritual fitness,” the following portion of the interview was highlighted by Justin Griffith on his atheist “Rock Beyond Belief” website:

Sciutto (ABC News): Why is it that spiritual people make better soldiers?

Cornum: The ethos that we adhere to. Always place the mission first. Never accept defeat. Never leave a fallen comrade.  Those kinds of things require you to have belief in something higher than yourself.

To be accurate, the US Army did not say Read more

MRFF Tangles with the Rules. Again.

Michael Weinstein’s MRFF has again demonstrated its tendency to hold others to a standard to which it does not hold itself.  It previously exhibited such behavior with its loose honoring of copyright, and also when it distributed letter from a member of the military, and of the MRFF, that was derogatory to military leadership.

This time, the MRFF (specifically, Bekki Miller) posted an email on their website written by Dustin Chalker (the plaintiff in the abandoned MRFF lawsuit).  His email was in response Read more

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