Tag Archives: pow/mia

MRFF Falsely Claims US Navy “Banned” Bibles on POW/MIA Table

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, created and run by Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, falsely claimed yesterday that the US Navy had “banned” a Christian Bible. The context was the presence of a “missing man” or POW/MIA table at the Navy Operational Support Center (NOSC) in Alameda, California. (A NOSC isn’t a Navy base, but a small facility that helps Navy Reservists maintain their readiness.) The MRFF routinely complains about Bibles being included in the displays, and this time also took issue with the specific Bible on the table. Weinstein’s sometime-research assistant Christine “Chris” Rodda put it this way [emphasis added]:

A POW/MIA table in the facility’s break room not only contains a Christian Bible, but the particular Bible displayed is the Holman “Sailor’s Bible,” one of the Holman military Bibles with the official branch emblem that MRFF got banned by the military back in 2012!

Someone must have had an old edition of this Bible…and decided to add it to the display, not only turning the table, which should honor ALL POWs and MIAs, into a divisive display of Christian privilege but doing so with a Bible that has been banned by the Navy for nearly a decade.

Later, Mikey – who never met an adjective he didn’t like – claimed the Bible had been “explicitly banned.”

One would think that a branch of the US military “banning” a Bible would be big news, but for some reason it’s never come up.

Probably because Chris Rodda isn’t telling the truth (again).

In 2004, B&H Publishing Group received Read more

Senate Confirms Denis McDonough as VA Secretary

The US Senate confirmed Biden appointee — and former Obama Chief of Staff — Denis McDonough as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs on Monday.

A relatively unnoticed office for most of the US public, the VA Secretary has, like so many positions, become increasingly political and controversial. Robert Wilkie, the previous VA Secretary under President Trump, made waves when the VA decided to put the VA motto on plaques at 142 VA cemeteries last summer. This wouldn’t seem like a big deal, except the VA motto is a quote from a speech made by President Abraham Lincoln: Read more

The Army, Facebook, and Mikey Weinstein

During the unique trials of the pandemic, US military chaplains are coming under fire for trying to provide support for their troops.

A few years ago, Michael “Mikey” Weinstein regularly made a ruckus over something frequently called “Chaplain’s Corner”. The pieces were generally short articles written by military chaplains and published in a military base’s local paper. Weinstein and his research assistant, Chris Rodda, were apparently unable to prove military Christians were actually doing anything wrong, so they took to finding articles with Christians saying something they didn’t like. Just about every week, it seemed, the MRFF would hit the press with another “the world is ending” claim about a Christian chaplain trying to subvert democracy by publishing an article in a small-circulation base paper. (Notably, they ignored those by other faiths.)

There were plenty of targets, of course, because these columns existed at pretty much every military base. (Routine public productions like that are good fodder for performance reviews.) In other words, Weinstein was able to keep himself in the press just by making a new complaint about old news every week. In many, if not most, cases, military bases responded by pulling the columns to mitigate the supposed offense. With the “victories” and coverage, Weinstein had found a new cash cow.

That is, until religious liberty advocates stepped in to defend the rights of US troops against the attacks by Weinstein and Rodda.

One of the most significant Read more