Monday, July 08, 2013

Tolerance: Working as Planned

Last February, attached to a very brief notice advertising a speaker for the National Prayer Luncheon, were two documents. The first was from the Deputy Chief of Chaplains, BGen Bobby Page:


Since the image is crappy (more on this in a moment), here is an excerpt:

As a reminder, advertising and promoting these interfaith events is to be done by Chaplain Corps members . . . . Some teams still look to First Sergeants or other representatives to help them make tickets available in the squadrons. This is acceptable as long as these squadron representatives do nothing to suggest government or personal endorsement of a religious event. [Emphasis added.]

The second was from then-AF Chief of Staff Gen Norton Schwartz:

Since this picture sucks more:

Leaders at all levels must balance Constitutional protections for an individual's free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and its prohibition against governmental establishment of religion. For example, they must avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion. Commanders or supervisors who engage in such behavior may cause members to doubt their impartiality or objectivity. The potential result is a degradation of the unit's morale, good order, and discipline.

Chaplain Corp programs . . . are vital to commanders' support of individual Airmen's needs and provide opportunities for the free exercise of religion. Although commanders are responsible for these programs, they must refrain from appearing to officially endorse religion generally or any particular religion. Therefore, I expect chaplains, not commanders, to notify Airmen of Chaplain Corps programs.

So it appears that commanders are not allowed to "appear to officially endorse" chaplain programs, including telling people about them.

It appears that the Left has gone from hating the military to subverting it to their own ends.

Weirdly, I couldn't actually find the full text of either of these letters on any official website, although they have been quoted extensively on atheist websites dancing on the grave of Christian America.

As a technical matter, does anyone understand how to use Google Drive to store pdfs for display on blogger? The embed code that Google Drive generates doesn't work well with blogger's narrow reading area, especially since it puts page thumbnails on the left side.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stupid. Obviously just having a chaplain corps is an endorsement of a religious program.

The govt could get out of that logical noose by disbanding them and opening up the armed forces to being supported by private sector chaplains, paid by their home denominations instead of being paid by taxpayers.

But those chaplains generals would never permit that.

Dexter said...

Remind me why chaplains even have commissions? Seems like warrant officer chaplains would be fine. Same with the military doctor and lawyer dregs.