Recent articles on this mainly quote this Weinstein character. They are basically trying to gin up something from nothing, giving the impression that what he says is military policy, when it isn’t. He is a private atheistic citizen with no official connection to the military.
One real Air Force regulation is quoted:
‘Section 2.11 requires “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,” the regulation states.
Military leaders were admonished not to use their position to “promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion.”
Something wrong with that? Only if you are a theocrat. Of course some here are!
Wind. Why do I spit into it? I must be an idiot!
“Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats,
Blowing through the letters that we wrote.
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves,
We’re idiots, babe.
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves” - Bob Dylan
The neutrality theorem is rather recent in First Amendment jurisprudence, and unfortunately it has taken this draconian turn of forbidding free exercise to certain classes of individuals who happen to be in the employ of government. This not an originalist understanding, and it is fraught with pitfalls and potential for abuse, as we are seeing here.
Part of the problem is the reaction of withdrawal from zones of risk created by inherent vagueness in the neutrality principle. If an officer says to a subordinate who just sneezed, “God bless you,” is he in violation of the neutrality principle? Arguably so. Should he be court martialed for it? Only in the eyes of those completely lacking any neutrality of their own, rabid atheists who see a theocrat under every bed, or rabid Muslims, who see an infidel in everyone but themselves.
So what really happens is the neutrality principle, which is a gross misunderstanding of the anti-federal wording of the First Amendment, is used by the real theocrats (Islam, Marxism, etc.) to create a void they then can then fill with their own vision. Neutrality as such is a mere transition between dominant cultural beliefs, and its primary purpose is to disarm the current dominant culture, to prevent it from holding roots or spreading, so that it may one day be supplanted by some outside insurgency.
We are in that transition, and if we find no reason, as a culture, to prefer our Judeo-Christian heritage over something inferior, we will lose that heritage, and all the good it has wrought.
So if you’re a private first class it’s OK to wear a cross but not if you’re one step up from that? Is that what you’re saying?
If you’re a private first class you can say you think religion is stupid and there’s no God but if you’re one step up from that you have to be silent about your religious unbelief. Is that what you’re saying?