Last week there was a terrible tragedy. An Army psychiatrist, conflicted by his Muslim faith and about to be deployed to Afghanistan, shot and killed 13 people in a murderous rampage at Ft. Hood. Since then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Casey and others have been in front of the press trying to stress that the Army needs diversity, that it's tolerant of other religions, yadda yadda yadda.
But is that what's happening in actuality? I was listening to NPR yesterday and was struck by the juxtaposition of two news stories that ran back to back. The first was a recap of the memorial service for the Ft. Hood victims attended by the President. The next story was about a lawsuit in a case that had been decided in favor of removing religious imagery from a public site.
I listened to the Ft. Hood memorial on NPR and realized that it was a very Christian event. Hindus need not apply. Muslims need not apply. Buddhists need not apply. And for crying out loud, this was certainly not a memorial for secularists. But it was sponsored by our government, attended by our President and First Lady (the President giving a very mainstream Christian speech), and if you think about it, every government-sponsored memorial service that I have ever seen is exclusively Christian.
So what happened to religious freedom in this country? For anyone who thinks that our forefathers created this country to be a "Christian nation," you know nothing about our forefathers and certainly nothing about the Constitution, which only mentions religion to guarantee freedom of it. None of the following words can be found in that document: God, Christian, Christianity, Jesus, or Christ. If this country was meant to be a "Christian nation," then wouldn't those words be all over that document?
Gen. Casey had been making the rounds of the news networks all week trying to assert that the Army is inclusive of all religions and beliefs. But what that memorial service said, at a volume much louder than Gen. Casey's voice had been all week, was that Christians only need apply. Where was the memorial service for anyone else?
Let me make this clear. What Major Hasan did (and I must say allegedly here, I suppose, since we must subscribe to the principle of "innocent until proven guilty") was horrible and inexcusable. The Army should have given him a discharge and he should have pressed for that harder than he apparently did before he went off the deep end and killed 13 people. While I personally would have preferred the outcome to be that he didn't survive his wounds, I suppose that if he hadn't he would have become even more of a martyr for Muslim extremists. But I do think that the Army inadvertently gave credence to Major Hasan's assertion that it is not really tolerant of other religions by showing its obvious Christian bent that was so prominently on display at that memorial service. This while the government is trying to convince us that all religions -- and by extension, secularism -- are welcome in Today's Army. (And by the way, why do we still have "In God We Trust" on our currency if, on the other hand, lawsuits to remove religious imagery from public areas have succeeded precisely because putting religious items in a state-sponsored, public area has been determined to be unconstitutional?)
The message is clear. The government gives lip service to inclusiveness while clearly displaying the exact opposite.
What do you think the odds of a Buddhist, a Hindu or a secularist being elected President are? My point exactly. In the last election cycle there were plenty of people who weren't happy that a Mormon was running!
This country has a loooooong way to go before we can truly say that there is religious freedom here. We should begin by making government-sponsored memorial services accessible and relevant for everyone. It's not enough for the Christians who run this government to think that this is a "Christian nation" that is simply tolerant of other people who happen to live in it.
