One of the items on Obama’s second term agenda is to root out
traditionally Christian chaplains from the military. He sees them
as bigots unworthy of conscience protections. Like Chick-fil-A,
they don’t uphold Obama’s “values.”
Obama’s mouthpieces in the military have already blurted this
out. In 2010, Admiral Michael Mullen told a Christian chaplain who
opposed the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that “If
you cannot get in line, resign your commission.” That same year
Lieutenant General Thomas P. Bostick, the Army’s deputy chief of
staff in charge of personnel, said military members who dissent
from Obama’s gay rights agenda should “get out.”
“Unfortunately, we have a minority of service members who are
still racists and bigoted and you will never be able to get rid of
all of them,” he said, as reported by the Washington
Times. “But these people opposing this new policy will need to
get with the program, and if they can’t, they need to get out.”
Pentagon officials go through the motions of saying that
military chaplains still enjoy religious freedom. But this claim
grows ever more lawyerly and narrow. When Defense Department
Counsel Jeh C. Johnson testified before Congress about the
implications of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy’s collapse for
religious freedom, he said that it would not affect what a chaplain
said in “the religious context.” In other words, chaplains would be
punished for objecting to Obama’s gay rights agenda anywhere
outside of a pulpit.
But even that feeble promise isn’t worth taking seriously, since
Obama’s military officials have already regulated sermons from the
pulpit. Last year they forbade Catholics chaplains from orally
criticizing the HHS mandate, permitting only a printed objection to
it. How long before the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains
requires vetting of all sermons on homosexuality?
At Maoist-style reeducation sessions, soldiers and chaplains
have already been told that “You remain obligated to follow orders
that involve interaction with others who are homosexual even if an
unwillingness to do so is based on strong, sincerely held moral or
religious beliefs.”
Also, it is not even clear if military chaplains control who
speaks from their pulpits. It is likely that they will have to turn
them over to other ministers preaching at gay nuptials whenever the
Pentagon so decrees . A September 2011 memo from DOD general
counsel Johnson indicates that any chapel space on a military base
can be appropriated for gay weddings, which is a blatant violation
of the Defense of Marriage Act. “Determinations” of chapel space,
he wrote, “should be made on a sexual-orientation neutral basis.”
By 2011, in open defiance of DOMA, the military authorized
ministerial training for gay marriage ceremonies on military
bases.
Considering himself very generous and tolerant, Obama has said
that he would never force a priest or minister to preside at a gay
wedding. This is an absurdly low guarantee of religious freedom.
But there is no reason to suppose that he will even honor that low
standard, given that he sees such a stance as discriminatory. In
time, pressure, both direct and indirect, will be brought to bear
on non-participating ministers. Even their silence will be seen as
a hate crime. Careers will rise or fall depending upon the level of
one’s participation in the promotion of gay rights.
The “LGBT” community will no doubt frame the issue as one of
“access”: How can a gay soldier have a right to marry on a military
base if military chaplains are free to refuse to marry them? At
last year’s first gay wedding at West Point, the lesbian couple
complained to the press that none of the ministers on campus agreed
to marry them, so they had to fly a chaplain in from elsewhere.
Using the “access” argument, Obama scotched Bush-era conscience
protections for pro-life Christian doctors working at federal
hospitals. They are required to distribute abortifacients whether
they like it or not. When the time is right, Obama will use the
same “access” argument to require ministerial participation in gay
weddings.
Keeping this option open, Obama last week announced that he will
disobey a provision protecting chaplains which Republicans included
in the national defense authorization bill he signed. The provision
states that the religious views of a soldier cannot be “the basis
of any adverse personnel action, discrimination or denial of
promotion, schooling, training or assignment,” and that chaplains
cannot be forced “to perform any rite, ritual or ceremony that is
contrary to the conscience, moral principles or religious beliefs
of the chaplain.”
Just as Obama refuses to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, so
he promises to ignore this provision, as he said in his signing
statement, calling it “unnecessary and ill-advised.” He added that
he will not let it slow down his gay-rights agenda: “My
Administration remains fully committed to continuing the successful
implementation of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and to
protecting the rights of gay and lesbian service members; Section
533 will not alter that.”
Obama won’t promise to protect these military chaplains for the
simple reason that he views them as the moral equivalent of
segregationists. Chai Feldblum, one of Obama’s commissioners on the
EEOC, has written that the state, acting in the name of
nondiscrimination, enjoys an absolute right to violate the
religious freedom of Christians: “Just as we do not tolerate
private racial beliefs that adversely affect African-Americans in
the commercial arena, even if such beliefs are based on religious
views, we should similarly not tolerate private beliefs about
sexual orientation and gender identity that adversely affect LGBT
people.”
That’s the essential view animating all of Obama’s policies
related to Christianity. Under this secularist dogmatism,
Christianity has no public rights. Freedom, as Feldblum puts it, is
a “zero sum game” in which the religious deserve to lose.
