Carl Forsling, a retired Marine MV-22 pilot, recently took to Task and Purpose to criticize the current Supreme Court appeal of court-martialed Marine LCpl Monifa Sterling. One part of Sterling’s case, as you’ll recall, centered on her decision to post a paraphrased Bible verse on her desk — which she was ordered to take down. Forsling opines:

Sterling worked in a customer-service job at an ID center, so people conducting their official business had to read the verse. This made effectively made something that was supposedly for her own personal inspiration into proselytization.

To quote Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word…” How does a posting a verse from Isaiah translate into an attempt to convert other people to a religion?  In short, it doesn’t, but claiming that it does makes it sound dramatically illicit.

Forsling does get one thing essentially correct:

The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces…stated that your chosen faith has to actually mandate that you do something in order for it to be eligible for accommodation.

The Court did say that — and that is essentially part of the appeal: Does the law require the religious exercise at issue to be “mandatory” for the government’s action to be a “substantial burden” on religion?

It turns out, if the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, they’ll have an excellent source of expert insight into whether this is a reasonable requirement within the military: the US Army.

The US Army recently explicitly stated that a religious tenet did not need to be required as part of one’s faith to warrant accommodation. The policy says the accommodation will be approved

regardless of whether the practice is compelled by, or central to, the religion concerned.

If the entire US Army — which is about a million Soldiers — can maintain morale, good order, and discipline while accommodating faith in the least restrictive manner possible, surely the US Marine Corps — which is about a quarter the size of the Army — can muster the discipline to do the same.

Forsling actually goes on to justify the Appeals court’s decision, though, and says the Marines have to restrict religious accommodation — otherwise the result will be chaos, hysteria, cats and dogs living together:

If everything the spirit moves one to do has to be accommodated, it makes virtually anything any service member does up for religious interpretation and possibly protection.

That would open the door for abuse both by the deeply faithful and the completely unfaithful to make requests for accommodation completely unrelated to any formal religious doctrine…Sincere religious beliefs might get lost in a pile of requests to accommodate midday bowling by followers of Lebowski-ism.

First, that’s a blatant strawman, since no one has suggested the US military should have to accommodate “everything the spirit moves one to do.”

Second, Forsling would have the military restrict a Catholic’s religious freedom to avoid the awkwardness of a “Jedi” asking for May 4th off. That’s not practicing religious liberty; that’s a policy of personal expedience, taking the easy path rather than the right one. Forsling is advocating a uniform policy simply because it is more convenient, in his mind, than doing the work necessary to ensure civil rights and human freedom.

Worse, Forsling provides exactly zero evidence to support his speculative theory that the world would end if religious accommodation were permitted to the maximum extent possible. That the military has had religious accommodations for decades (arguably, its entire existence) without such drama severely undermines his storytelling.  (Reference Rabbi Goldman and his yarmulke, for example.)

Forsling then does what many critics of Christianity have done over the past few years. When faced with, in their view, a Christian “demand”, they ask incredulously, “What if the Muslims did it?!?!”

Would you feel the same if she had posted an alternative verse, be that from another faith or no faith…? It could be just another mainstream faith’s message, like “Allahu Akbar,” but what about “Hail Satan” or “God is dead?”

How about “Who cares?” The content of Forsling’s bumper stickers is different (“Jews are infidels” and “atheists are fools” probably wouldn’t be allowed, so “God is dead” probably wouldn’t, either), but beyond that, what’s wrong with his proposal? Is he, a former Marine officer, scared of other religions? Does he assume everyone else would be, too?

What’s wrong with letting an Airman, Sailor, Soldier or Marine put up a piece of paper at their desk that makes an encouraging statement that also happens to come from their religious text?

There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it would be a good thing. Others who saw it would be able to directly observe religious diversity within their US military. By virtue of being exposed to that religious diversity, they would become more tolerant of it.  Isn’t the US military always saying their strength is in their diversity?  This is a win on all fronts.

Three days after Forsling’s post went up, Kamal Kalsi wrote a piece on the same site detailing the Army’s policy change allowing him and his fellow Sikhs to serve without abandoning the articles of their faith. After noting he wasn’t allowed to wear a pink turban (see Forsling’s strawman above), Kalsi makes some fascinating points from which Forsling could learn:

A good friend of mine, Lt. Col. Claude Brittain, served as a Pentagon chaplain before he passed away last year. He always supported our efforts to help open doors for religious minorities. Bluntly, I asked him one day why he continues to stick his neck out for us. He told me that in order for him to be a good Christian, he felt compelled to stand up for Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and others…

This is how we counter threats like ISIS. ISIS doesn’t believe in diversity or religious freedom. That’s their weakness and we have to learn to exploit it if we’re to have any chance of defeating their underlying ideology. You don’t have to go back too far in history to see that the Nazis were way more “uniform” than we were, and that’s why we fought them. We can fight wars with bullets and tanks, but it’s our American ideals that will ultimately win the day. America’s military should look like the people it serves.

Might such a policy of liberty occasionally require work or a hard decision? Sure. The years of work on the turban/beard/hijab policy are evidence of that. But where in the Constitution does it say liberty is protected until it gets too hard?

Liberty is protected by its practice, not by its suppression.  Let’s exercise some liberty.

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