Whose Bible? Whose Army?

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Whose Bible?  Whose Army?

ABP (Associated Baptist Press) News reports that the Pentagon will no longer license Lifeway Christian Resources (associated with the Southern Baptist Convention) to emboss official military emblems on a line of its Bibles.

The casual reader will be surprised that the Joint Chiefs of Staff license any product, as if they were a sports franchise negotiating with Chinese factory bosses for tee-shirts, water bottles, and underwear with advertising printed on them.

The second problem is that the Pentagon is a 70-year-old building in Washington.  It doesn’t license, say, or do anything; it is a building with a roof and walls and offices and restrooms and cafeterias and windows.  Buildings are remarkably deficient in intellect, will, or voice, except in late-night horror movies about lust-crazed elevators.  Attributing a statement to the Pentagon is as careless as attributing one to the Vatican.  The Vatican is a small city-state, and can’t say anything.  One might as well attempt to attempt to give a voice to Luxembourg or Liechtenstein. 

An accurate attribution is to report that a properly constituted authority figure by name within the Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Vatican, or the Pentagon has made a moral, ethical, legal, or business decision.

Any variation on “The Pentagon says…” is sloppy reporting, for it does not say what individual or named committee under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff enjoys the power to license tchotchkes.

And for me, there’s nothing that echoes the sacrificial spirit of Sergeant York, Audie Murphy, and Dorie Miller like a committee of commissioned officers in air-conditioned suites cutting deals for Chinese coffee mugs with the Navy seal on them.

So who put the “Eeeeeeeeeeeek!” into the unnamed licensing committee at the Pentagon?

Mikey – yes, a grown man who goes by “Mikey” - Weinstein is the recipient of a first-rate education first at the Air Force Academy and then at law school, all funded by the taxpayer.  He has demonstrated his gratefulness by suing lots of folks because apparently, in one of those late-night bull sessions that are an essential part of barracks life, a sort of Hyde Park Corner safety valve granted by the wiser sort of NCO, he once heard religious opinions with which he did not agree.

The horror, the horror.

In such matters one should, of fairness, not only read about an individual, but should read what he says: http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org.   Note the statement under the banner of the web site:

When one proudly dons a U.S. Military uniform, there is only one religious symbol: the American flag.  There is only one religious scripture: the American Constitution.  Finally, there is only one religious faith: American patriotism. 

– Mikey Weinstein

Mikey’s proposed incarnation of the State as a religion, and as the sole religion, is a novelty of tyranny quite in opposition to the Constitution Mikey purports to defend.

There may or may not be ethical and legal arguments for a military symbol embossed on the cover of a Bible, missal, siddur, or other prayer book.  However, to imagine an soldier in the heat, filth, dust, and danger of Whose-Brilliant-Idea-Was-This-istan being offended because the fellow next to him owns a copy of a Bible with an Army symbol on its cover is, to the generous-minded, unthinkable.

If Mikey, a keyboard commando who apparently has not been in combat himself, wants to own and read in his comfy office a copy of a Bible without anything embossed in the cover, under the Constitution he is free to do so.  And if an E-2 in 120-degree heat can take a few minutes to read from a Bible whose cover is different from Mikey’s, he not only has the same Constitutional right to do so, he has earned and defended that right in ways Mikey fails to understand.

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