Last Saturday, the US Military Academy football team posted a video of the celebration following their win over Temple. The video included the players kneeling in prayer in the locker room.
Michael “Mikey” Weinstein wasn’t having it:
Officials with the U.S. Military Academy pulled Read more
Chris Gacek of the Family Research Council recently urged readers to voice their support for military chaplains in a blog entitled “Protect Your Military Chaplains from a Bully.” The context of his call was the most recent “histrionics” of a bully — Michael “Mikey” Weinstein — as he attacked Chaplain (MajGen) Dondi Costin and others for attending the CALL awards event:
What is of particular note is Weinstein’s complete and utter lack of perspective. Does he honestly believe that a retirement-type event honoring a member of Congress who has supported the needs of chaplains would not be attended by appreciative members of the military chaplaincy? Is he really so misguided as to think that the DOD IG is going to state that military chaplains attending a retirement event for a member of the House in the company of other House members and a U.S. Senator is a punishable offense? Sadly, he appears to be.
That’s true, with nuance. Weinstein wouldn’t have Read more
Believe it or not, Michael “Mikey” Weinstein has been immortalized in theatre. In 2008, Steve Cosson wrote “This Beautiful City,” a play about Colorado Springs and the Evangelical community. Mikey Weinstein is portrayed in that play, and he’s touted it whenever its been in production.
The American Theater Company’s Youth Ensemble put it on this summer in Chicago. As part of their experience, they visited Colorado Springs and saw New Life Church, which also plays a prominent role in the play, and they met Mikey Weinstein.
While Weinstein was probably holding out for Bruce Willis, he was played instead by ATC actor Max Dizon:
In an August interview with the cast, Dizon explained what it was like to meet the man he was portraying [emphasis added]: Read more
Over the weekend, Tom Carpenter’s Forum on the Military Chaplaincy jumped the shark when he said the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty was a “Christian Supremacist Endorser” whose ideology was like ISIS.
Carpenter linked to a pay-per-click article with the grammatically awkward title “10 Ways The Ideology of ISIS And Franklin Graham Is Near-Identical,” written by “progressive” Christian Benjamin Corey. Carpenter then said [emphasis added]:
Could not much of the same criticisms be made of the Christian Supremacist Endorsers (ie the oxymoron Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty) and some of the chaplains they endorse?
(Hypocritical, don’t you think, that Read more
People for the American Way, a politically left-wing/liberal organization, recently criticized a Family Research Council email that cited attacks on military religious freedom. PFAW’s complaint was that the stories FRC’s President Tony Perkins cited were, in their words, “easily debunked.”
As evidence, they linked to other online articles that did not debunk FRC’s stories.
For example, PFAW linked to an Americans United article that claimed Army Chaplain (Capt) Joe Lawhorn was not, in fact, sanctioned for discussion of his faith. But he indisputably was given paperwork for mentioning his faith, and the AU article doesn’t actually “debunk” the claim — it only criticizes the claim, without detracting from those facts.
PFAW similarly linked to another left-wing site that criticized Navy Chaplain Wes Modder, who was nearly run out of the Navy. The linked article cited the Navy commander’s initial accusations as fact — and neither that site nor PFAW bothered to mention that the Navy ultimately denied the attempt to kick Chaplain Modder out. In oversimplified terms, the complaint was invalidated. The linked article also quoted Read more
Kelly Shackelford of the First Liberty Institute wrote at the National Review that the US Supreme Court needs to review the case of court-martialed former US Marine Monifa Sterling:
Americans serving in the military lost some of their rights earlier this month when the military’s highest court ruled that a Marine has no rights under an important religious freedom law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).
Shackelford explained where he believed the appeals court improperly diverged from the appropriate application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act: Read more
The ACLJ has again written a letter to the US military encouraging them not to allow the military to become
an unwitting tool to implement Mr. Weinstein’s agenda of eviscerating religious freedom in the Armed Forces of the United States.
The letter was directed to the (acting) DoD Inspector General, Mr. Glenn Fine, the most recent recipient of a Weinstein missive. Weinstein had written the DoD IG after Peterson AFB refused to crucify a US Air Force officer who had a Bible on his desk.
The ACLJ’s letter (PDF) is much like the last two — one of which also went to Mr. Fine. Besides Read more
One of Michael “Mikey” Weinstein’s favorite refrains is there would be “blood in the streets” if another religion did what Christian “fundamentalists” get away with in the US military. That his dramatic statement is an irrelevant logical fallacy matters not; it appeals to emotion and energizes his acolytes to call for the government to restrict the religious freedom of Christians in the US military, the Constitution notwithstanding.
Recently, in castigating USAF Major Steve Lewis’ display of a Bible, Weinstein verbosely said [capitalization original, emphasis added]:
Can you even IMAGINE the limitless, overflowing blood in the streets which would immediately occur if, say, another USAF official chose to similarly display, just as Major Steve Lewis presently exhibits his open and yellow-highlighted Christian bible in the very center of his official USAF desk, other sectarian, theological texts such as The Satanic Bible, the Islamic Quran, the Hindu Shruti, the Sikh Adi Granth and the Atheist movementʼs leading texts…?
There wouldn’t just be “blood in the streets.” It would be there “immediately,” and it would be “limitless and overflowing.” All if another religious US troop dared to put out a religious text or symbol.
Weinstein’s fallacious implication reflects the research style of his assistant, Chris Rodda — meaning his argument is unsupported by evidence and it relies on assumptions and convenient omissions.
Why, for example, do you think Mikey Weinstein declined Read more