Needed: A Few Good Spartans!

With the zeal and style which earned him the moniker "Bulldog," Col. Mikey Weinstein (USAF, Ret.) has launched a recruiting drive to find volunteers to help him shore up the crumbling wall of separation between Church and State in the US military services. With a kind of flair that is typical of his approach to his struggle against the illicit and unconstitutional encroachment of the 'militant' evangelistic "Christian" Church upon the structure and purposes of the USer military machine.

Harper's last month had a long, featured piece in which Weinstein's crusade against "God's Warriors" was prominient.

Weinstein leads the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, from offices in Albuquerque. This is the MRFF Mission Statement:

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment and the “no religious test” of Article VI.

Weinstein is an AF Academy grad, former SJA, who served over three years in the West Wing of the Reagan White House as legal counsel. In his final position there, Weinstein was named the Committee Management Officer of the much-publicized Iran-Contra Investigation in his capacity as Assistant General Counsel of The White House Office of Administration, Executive Office of the President of the United States.

This career concealed a maverick, which took form in MRFF when his son also attended the AF Academy and experienced frequent, demeaning verbal assaults by "Christian" proselytizers within the ranks of both the Corps of Cadets, but more dangerously and more damningly among the faculty and trainers who held the careers of the cadets in their hands. In 2006, Weinstein sued, but the suit was dismissed.

And the MRFF was born. And according to Mark Crispin Miller, is "Doing the Lord's work":

Friends,

MRFF is doing the Lord’s work (so to speak)–and paying for it, too.

You ought to see the foul emails they get, day after day, and hear the threats phoned in, day after day. The stuff is really toxic, as there are, of course, some seething people out there–livid types who can’t contain their racist bile or, especially, their antisemitism.

Most of them are, fortunately, much too cowardly to go beyond anonymous invective;
and yet you never know. (Look what happened at the Holocaust Museum on this very day.)

And so MRFF has to spend a lot just on increased security for Mikey Weinstein and his
family; and this is only part of it, since MRFF’s all-important litigation–suing the DoD for allowing Christianists to run the military, in blatant violation of the Constitution – also costs a lot.

So please do try to donate what you can, even though these are tough times.

Understand that they’re not getting any help from the Anti-Defamation League (which never would offend the ultra-right supporters of the right-wing government of Israel), or any help, of course, from Pres. Obama (who has actually expanded Bush’s "faith-based" programs, even though they too are fundamentally unconstitutional).

It’s therefore up to those of us who care about the First Amendment to step up and help, by doing whatever we can do.

And here's the Link to "Build The Wall!, where there's a vid of some scary sky-pilot talking savior-proselytizing shit to young, scared, 'open' kids.