The American Muslim (TAM)

MUST READ: Deconstructing hysteria: how the ongoing misstatements of military policy began

Charles McCalpin

Posted May 7, 2013

Deconstructing hysteria: how the ongoing misstatements of military policy began

by Charles McCalpin

On Sunday, BizPacReview continued spreading the hysteria begun last week when Fox News, Breitbartcom, and the Family Research Council distorted the facts around military policy on religious neutrality.

The BizPac article, about Rear Admiral William Lee who vows not to back down on his ‘Constitutional right to share his faith,” contains many of the false themes that have are being echoed by outraged and misinformed conservatives across the internet. To hear Lee tell it, Christians are being persecuted daily just for being Christians. He boasts that he as broken the law many times by “sharing his faith” with those of lesser rank.

Each generation of blog and news stories seems to further embellish earlier misstatements of fact. The internet is awash with claims that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has allied with the Obama Administration to rid the military of any Christian influence. The MRFF is said to be an atheistic and anti-Christian organization. Its leader, Mikey Weinstein, is said to be an anti-Christian Jew who has been hired by the administration and given the unofficial title of ‘tolerance advisor.’ Allegedly, he and Obama will use this position to implement new policies of Christian persecution. The beginning of that process is the Pentagon’s recent “ban on religious proselytization.” Christians who profess their faith will be court-martialed, according to sites like Fox News, Breitbart.com, the Christian Post (since partially retracted) and countless blogs.

All of these claims are demonstrably untrue, but that makes no difference to those who continue to spread them as fact. Is this just a misunderstanding? How have these bizarre claims come to be accepted as truth by so many thousands of enraged Christians? Given below is an analysis of where these false statements began and how they were spread.

Part 1: The excuse

The excuse for this latest round of hysterical persecution fantasy seems to have been an April 23 meeting between military leaders and three military experts, one of whom was Weinstein. Attending the same meeting were former ambassador Joe Wilson and Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. This meeting was no secret; Sally Quinn discussed the pending meeting in her April 26 article in the Washington Post.

Weinstein and the others pressed the military leaders about threats to military cohesiveness. These threats included actionable instances of misogyny, Islamaphobia, anti-semitism, sexual assault, and officers proselytizing those of lesser rank.

In the Washington Post article, Weinstein said something which has generated a number of misquotes and misrepresentations in the days that followed. Speaking of all of the problems raised,“This is a national security threat. What is happening [aside from sexual assault] is spiritual rape. And what the Pentagon needs to understand is that it is sedition and treason. It should be punished.”

Weinstein and the others urged enforcement of Air Force Instruction 1-1, Section 2.11. (PDF download here.)

For many, it will be difficult to imagine how section 2.11 could be controversial. Written in August, 2012, it emphasizes the rights of all service members to express their religion or lack thereof, but it insists that they do so in accordance with the Constitution and respect for other people’s rights. In particular, it gently emphasizes that service members must be especially mindful not to use their authority to pressure those of lesser rank. The entire section is quoted below for context.

“2.11. Government Neutrality Regarding Religion. Leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for an individual’s free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and the constitutional 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 and objectivity. The potential result is a degradation of the unit’s morale, good order, and discipline. Airmen, especially commanders and supervisors, must ensure that in exercising their right of religious free expression, they do not degrade morale, good order, and discipline in the Air Force or degrade the trust and confidence that the public has in the United States Air Force.”

The clarity of the language makes the resulting hysteria inexplicable. The Washington Post article was received as an attack by some conservative religious bloggers in the days that followed, but then a series of troubling coincidences began to arise in conservative coverage of the April 23 meeting.

On April 30, Todd Starnes of Fox News Radio published an article with a headline that was itself a false statement. “Pentagon: Religious Proselytization Not Permitted”

Starnes also started the article with a statement that managed to imply several different falsehoods. “Religious liberty groups have grave concerns after they learned the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to “rape” and advocated that military personnel who proselytize should be court martialed.”

This one sentence managed to convey at least four false impressions. The word “vetting” suggested the purpose of the April 23 meeting was to allow Wilkerson, Weinstein and Wilson to edit military policy. In reality, the policies were already established, and Weinstein was just frustrated that they were not being enforced.

Starnes’ lead also misstated the use of the word “rape” to ignore that the term “spiritual rape” also referred to the psychological impact of misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia, AND service members taking advantage of their rank to proselytize and otherwise religiously pressure those of lesser rank.

While it’s true that Weinstein considers predatory use of rank and authority to be a form of spiritual rape, that is not the same as comparing all evangelism with rape. Starnes demonstrated elsewhere in the article that he fully understood the difference.

“He said there is a time and a place for those in uniform to share their faith,” Starnes said of Weinstein “– but he took issues with fundamentalism that he says is causing widespread problems in the military.” It is therefore difficult to believe it was an accident that Starnes’ wording ignored the rank-specific component of admonitions against proselytization.

And all of this was in his first sentence. He took it much further in the rest of the article, and he also brought in the Family Research Council (FRC) and the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL) to further distort the facts.

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READ FULL ARTICLE at The Examiner including point by point refutations.

TAM Editors note - see also: