Collins Defends Military Mettle
As an Iraq war veteran, Congressman Doug Collins (R-Ga.) knows better than anyone how comforting faith can be on the battlefield. So when an Army leader goes out of his way to punish a chaplain for doing his job, Rep. Collins is understandably upset. Like FRC, he couldn’t believe what happened in his District’s own backyard at Fort Benning. To the surprise of Chaplain Joe Lawhorn, he was summoned to his commander’s office on Thanksgiving Day, where Col. David Fivecoat reprimanded him over a suicide prevention training Lawhorn had led in which he dared to include faith as a resource for depression.
As an Iraq war veteran, Congressman Doug Collins (R-Ga.) knows better than anyone how comforting faith can be on the battlefield. So when an Army leader goes out of his way to punish a chaplain for doing his job, Rep. Collins is understandably upset.
Like FRC, he couldn’t believe what happened in his District’s own backyard at Fort Benning. To the surprise of Chaplain Joe Lawhorn, he was summoned to his commander’s office on Thanksgiving Day, where Col. David Fivecoat reprimanded him over a suicide prevention training Lawhorn had led in which he dared to include faith as a resource for depression.
Although religion was only part of a broader message on combatting suicide, the Chaplain was issued a Letter of Concern for acting in accordance with the Defense Department’s own guidance, which says that “unless it could have an adverse impact on military readiness, unit cohesion, and good order and discipline, the Military Departments will accommodate individual expressions of sincerely help beliefs.”
[Last] week, Rep. Collins, who also serves as a chaplain in the Air Force reserve, expressed his own frustration with the Army’s intolerance in a letter to Brigadier General John King. “My own service as a military chaplain taught me the importance of offering honest counsel and serving as a resource to those in need. I believe that military chaplains continue to play an important role as religious and spiritual leaders to our men and women in uniform and their families… Chaplain Lawhorn demonstrated this commitment when he shared, during the course of suicide prevention training, his own struggle with depression and how his faith helped guide him through a difficult time.” Collins goes on to ask that the complaint be withdrawn from the Chaplain’s file, a goal the Liberty Institute will pursue in court if Army leadership refuses.
Meanwhile, FRC and members of the Military Religious Freedom Coalition sent a letter of our own to the Secretary of the Army, John McHugh, who, ironically, had clarified the rules on religious expression in the branch as recently as last fall. “The Army has a significant problem with depression and suicide. It seems logical that all potential solutions for resolving this devastating problem should be explored, including the spiritual dimensions of the issue.” Col. Fivecoat’s actions, if not corrected by the rescission of the Letter of Concern, will most likely deprive men and women dealing with depression and the stress of military life, the help they need. For more on the controversy, don’t miss Rep. Doug Collins’s interview on “Washington Watch” [Thursday].
Blackburned by GOP, Pro-Lifers Look for Answers
Rep. Renee Ellmers may not feel “beholden” to pro-life groups, but she’s certainly beholden to voters – plenty of whom showed up to her office yesterday to protest her postponement of H.R. 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Young people packed the hallway outside of Ellmers’s office to complain about the Congresswoman’s role in shelving a bill several months in the making. “We rally and knock on doors. We are the ones that help elect them and do the work behind the scenes,” one college student told reporters. “To have one of the people we worked for back down, it’s kind of shocking and it hurts us.”
Unfortunately for conservatives, it seems that Ellmers had some help in her misguided campaign from an unlikely source: pro-life conservative Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). Blackburn, who was an original cosponsor of the legislation with Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), is being blamed by conservative colleagues for aiding Ellmers’s cause behind the scenes.
For pro-life members, many of whom were thrilled at the idea of passing the five-month ban on abortions during the March for Life, it was “incomprehensible” that a handful of Republicans would sabotage the bill. According to NRO, Blackburn, along with Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) “led the effort” to pull the bill before a vote. At issue was the bill’s rape and incest exception, which Reps. Blackburn and Ellmers both agreed to in 2013 when the bill was first voted on. Their support then is what’s driving so much confusion now.
“Republican supporters of the pain-capable bill, in its current iteration, are perplexed by Blackburn.Some sources suggest that she is fine with the bill as written, but wants to keep the GOP women united – the sticking point:a requirement that a woman who was a victim of rape or incest and wants to have an abortion after the fifthmonth of pregnancy must report the assault to law enforcement – so she is trying to ‘manage’ the bloc of opponents to the bill.” Either way, both GOP leaders and pro-life groups are disappointed. “Blackburn led the push for the rape and incest exception in the first place,” a lawmaker told NRO, which suggests “that she is moving the goal posts on her own bill.”
For Baker, Some Roll Reversal
These days, you have to be a tough cookie to own a bakery. Everyone from cake makers to flower arrangers are being drafted into the battle to redefine marriage – whether they want to be or not! But a recent case with one sweet shop owner shows the broad consequences of the half-baked movement seeking to punish people of conscience.
Colorado, which already had its hands full with Jack Phillips’s case, is going back for seconds. If bakers can be forced to make same-sex “wedding” cakes, what about anti-homosexual ones? Marjorie Silva is testing that theory after a controversy at Denver’s Azucar Bakery, where a customer came in with an interesting order: a cake with two men holding hands and an “X” over them. In iced lettering, he requested “God Hates Gays.”
Marjorie was appalled, as most people would be. She refused to make the cake, and told the man, “We’re not doing this. This is just very discriminatory and hateful.” That triggered a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Division, where commissioners will have to decide if the same freedom they denied to Christian bakers suddenly depends on the message. Jack Phillips, who politely declined a same-sex “wedding” request, was sentenced to sensitivity training by a similar Colorado agency and ordered to make cakes for homosexuals – or pay fines in excess of $500 a customer.
Like Jack, Marjorie is refusing to promote a message she morally opposes. The reality under the First Amendment is this: no small business owner should be coerced by the government to violate their conscience or religious beliefs – whether it’s an abortion coverage mandate or a two-tiered wedding cake. Kerri Kupec with Alliance Defending Freedom argues that both bakers should have the right to operate their business according to their moral values. “At the end of the day, this is about free speech,” she said. “They punished Jack Phillips for acting according to his conscience. It will be interesting to see how they act here.”
This twist to a much-wider problem is a good example of the unintended consequences of policing people’s moral beliefs. When the government breaches our fundamental rights in one area, the impact is always wider. If I was a baker, or a t-shirt maker, and I was asked to bake or print a slogan that God hates anybody, I would refuse to do it. Regardless of what you believe about same-sex “marriage” or homosexuality, no one should be forced to participate in an activity that tramples their conscience.
But this clash, as Father Richard John Neuhaus predicted in his 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, was inevitable. Once faith is stripped from society, something always fills the void. And that “something,” in this case, is secularism – not your grandmother’s secularism, but a modern strain that is “rude, aggressive, and hegemonic.”
“The new secularism,” George Weigel paraphrases, would not be content to live and let live; it was determined to push, not only religion, but religiously informed moral argument, out of public life, and to do so on the ground that religious conviction is inherently irrational. And of course it would be but a short step from there to the claim that religious conviction is irrational bigotry, a claim implied by the Obama administration’s refusal, in defiance of its constitutional responsibilities, to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act in the federal courts.“
As we’ve explained before, this isn’t just about marriage – it’s about the fundamental right of every person to have and express an opinion. If the government can decide what you can and can’t believe about sexuality, it’s only a matter of time before that same ideological intolerance spills into debates over guns, the environment or even the economy. This may be how the cookie crumbles, but our fundamental freedoms shouldn’t crumble with it!
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
