truthout: Pentagon Chaplain Accused of Aiding Proselytizing
Last month, truthout‘s ace senior editor Jason Leopold wrote about a report released by the Defense Department’s inspector general which found that “high-ranking Army and Air Force personnel violated long-standing military regulations when they participated in a promotional video for an evangelical Christian organization while in uniform and on active duty.”
As Leopold tells us this week, the blatant disregard of constitutional law at the Pentagon continues.
- On the heels of a scathing report issued by the Defense Department’s inspector general that took high-level Pentagon officials to task for allowing an evangelical Christian organization unfettered access to the Department of Defense (D.O.D.) to promote its fundamentalist agenda, comes word the Pentagon’s top chaplain opened its doors yet again to another evangelical group whose leader recently spent two days at the facility proselytizing, passing out Christian literature, and “saving souls.”
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According to documents obtained by the watchdog group the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and made available to Truthout, David Kistler, President of Hickory, North Carolina-based H.O.P.E. Ministries International, embarked on a “DC Crusade” along with dozens of members of the evangelical organization for two weeks that included two days inside the Pentagon proselytizing and preaching the “gospel” to government employees and “saving souls.”
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Col. William Broome, the Pentagon chaplain, and his deputy, Maj. Alan Pomaville, invited Kistler’s group to speak to D.O.D. employees at a Pentagon prayer breakfast June 6 and in the Pentagon auditorium June 7, according to a copy of a recent newsletter published by H.O.P.E Ministries. Kistler, according to written statements made to his congregation, spent a considerable amount of his time at the Pentagon proselytizing to D.O.D. employees in violation of federal law.
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Mikey Weinstein, the president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said H.O.P.E Ministries’ presence inside the Pentagon in 2005 and in June is a blatant violation of the laws separating church and state.
Weinstein said he and his legal staff are still preparing to file a comprehensive federal lawsuit against the D.O.D. for widespread First Amendment and Bill of Rights violations as well as similar violations of Clause 3, Article VI of the Constitution, which prohibits any “religion test” for any position in the federal government.
Weinstein said the lawsuit has been delayed only because of the “overwhelming, non-stop reports of out-of-control Christian fundamentalism his organization has been receiving” from soldiers who indicated to Weinstein’s staff that rampant Christian fundamentalism has plagued the halls of the D.O.D. and soldiers on the battlefield in Iraq are being forced by their superiors to accept Jesus Christ as their saviors. Weinstein, a former White House attorney under Ronald Reagan, general counsel H. Ross Perot and an Air Force Judge Advocate (J.A.G.), has called for Congressional hearings into the Pentagon’s attempts to “Christianize” the military and the D.O.D.
As Leopold rightly states in his article, “the Constitution bars the federal government from establishing religion.” Clearly, men and women in uniform who are themselves proselytizing or allowing proselytizing to occur are violating the Constitution. There seem to be quite significant problems with this concept at several levels of the government. (I’d link to some past posts here, but there are simply too many to include–surf through the archives and you’ll see what I’m talking about.) As such, I think Weinstein’s proposed Congressional hearing is an idea that’s time has come.
