President Barack Obama has announced his “strong opposition” to efforts in Congress to protect the religious freedoms of members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
U.S. Representative John Fleming (R-LA) and U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) have offered amendments in their respective chambers to the National Defense Authorization Act. The amendments would require the military branches to accommodate actions and speech of service members which reflect “the conscience, moral principles, or religious beliefs of the members.”
Rep. Fleming’s amendment has been adopted by the House Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Lee’s amendment has been approved by the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. President Obama says he opposes the amendment because it would result in a “significant adverse effect on good order, discipline, morale, and mission accomplishment.”
Rep. Fleming deplores the President’s stance on his amendment. “This administration is aggressively hostile toward religious beliefs that it deems to be politically incorrect. For many of our men and women in uniform, their faith and religious beliefs are what sustains them through the enormous pressures and stresses of the battlefield. The First Amendment rights of our military members must be protected.”
There have been stunning incidents of anti-Christian and anti-religious actions by military officials in recent weeks. In one case, the U.S. Army Reserve used training materials that identified “evangelical Christians” and Catholics as “religious extremists,” in the same vein as Al Quaeda, Hamas, and the Ku Klux Klan.
In the latest case, the Defense Department had warned military personnel that they could be disciplined and even court-martialed if they shared their faith with fellow service members.
It was further revealed that the Pentagon was developing its religious liberty policies with active consultation from Mike Weinstein, an atheist activist. Weinstein has called evangelical Christians “fundamentalist monsters of human degradation” and a “national security threat.”
Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, bemoaned the President’s efforts to scuttle the religious liberty language, saying “the Administration has now gone beyond accommodating the anti-Christian activists who want to remove any vestige of Christianity from the military, to aiding them by blocking this measure. This chilling suppression of religious freedom is driving faith underground in our military and will eventually drive it out. That undermines the moral foundation of the world’s most powerful military and the country they serve.”
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