We aren't disagreeing about the need for unity in the military especially in combat.
Let me throw it back to you a different way. If instead of the promotion being less likely for a chaplain of a different denomination than the chief's it was less likely because of the candidate's race what would your reaction be?
Wm, discrimination is wrong whether due to race or denomination.
However, what I’m saying to you is that with their requirement to promote and ALSO to keep a representative balance of denominations, that sometimes what might appear on surface to be discrimination is not, in fact, discrimination.
Let’s take Catholic chaplains, for example.
If you were the Catholic Chief of Chaplains at a promotion board, you would know that the service required 300 priests and had less than 100. You also know that instructions to the promotion board ALLOW you to take into consider under-strength denominations if those chaplains are FULLY QUALIFIED.
You have a board with 100 names on it. The congress of the US says you are permitted to promote 20.
You look at all the records with your other board memebers. The most important records are those called Officer Efficiency Reports from the past commanders of these chaplains. Each of them before the board has from 10-20 of these in their file. The chaplain can be rated a 1,2,3,4 with 4 the lowest.
Most of the chaplains have an average rating of 2. There are a very few, 5 of them with a rating of 1.5 to 1.
They are the BEST QUALIFIED. Therefore they are at the top of the list REGARDLESS OF DENOMINATION.
The bottom 10 are between 2.1 and 4: They are the least qualified and WILL NOT be promoted REGARDLESS OF DENOMINATION.
You are down to 85 candidates for the remaining 15 slots. The 85 candidates are all QUALIFIED. You rank order them from 6-85 based on a numerical score between 1.51 and and 2.0. In looking at other points in the record, besides just the OER averages, you see reasons to assign other +’s to the records of other candidates. Instead of the next 15 being merely numbers 6-21, you have a list that might stretch from 6-35. These are the FULLY QUALIFIED.
As you look at the 15 more promotions you are to consider denominational balance, race, gender, doctrinal practice so that the military can have a good spread of these attributes so that ministry can best take place.
You know that you are 200 Catholic Chaplains short in the military and that there are 2 Catholic chaplains in the FULLY QUALIFIED category who are NOT ranked numbers 6-21. Therefore, you don’t want to LOSE ground with Catholic coverage, so you move those chaplains to slots 20 and 21 and bump the former #21 down to #22.
How is this different than in the regular, non-chaplain officer ranks bumping up a fully qualified officer who also speaks FLUENT ARABIC to number 21 and bumping the former #21 down to 22?
It is not any different. It is taking care FIRST of the needs of the service.