A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Bishop Gracida likes me! August 5, 2011

I left a comment at Bishop Rene Gracida’s excellent blog, and he decided to turn it into a post!  Woot!  My man!  Bishop Gracida had a post regarind the secular left’s continuing efforts to drive Christianity from the public square, and one of their favorite battlegrounds is the military.  To the secular left, the military serves no purpose save as a testbed for their social engineering schemes, and Christianity has no place in that!  The Air Force had a very sensible program intended to ground missile launch officers – the men responsible for sending MinutemanIII missiles loaded with thermonuclear warheads to their targets – in just war theory.  Much of it was based on classic Thomist reasoning with a healthy dose of Sacred Scripture.  Well, to the secular pagan left, that is just too offensive, and they had to move to destroy the program:

The Air Force has suspended a course that was taught by chaplains for more than 20 years because the material included Bible passages.
The course, called “Christian Just War Theory” was taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and used Scripture from both the Old and New Testaments to show missile launch officers that it can be moral to go to war.

But the watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the course violated the constitutional separation of church and state and filed a complaint last Wednesday on behalf of 31 missile launch officers – both instructors and students.

David Smith, the spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, said the main purpose of the class was to help missile launch officers understand that “what they are embarking on is very difficult and you have to have a certain amount of ethics about what you are doing to do that job.”
He said the class was suspended the same day the complaint was filed.

It’s a shame the Air Force chickened out like that, but they have bigger battles to fight and don’t want to face an annoying lawsuit.  So, according to the secular left, you can’t even MENTION Sacred Scripture or Christian beliefs in public in the military, otherwise, it’s a hideous violation of Church and state – which, to the left, of course, means no Church, and all state.  My comment in response to this sad turn of events:

My best friend was a missile launch officer at Minot AFB, ND from 1999-2003. Towards the end of his tour, he was a crew commander and instructor. He is also a devout evangelical Christian (in spite of my efforts at Catholic evangelization!), as are many officers in the USAF. It is not well known that many USAF officers are devout Christians. Colorado Springs, CO, the location of the Air Force Academy where most officers are formed and trained, has been a hotbed of evangelicalism, and that evangelicalism has had an impact on the officers trained at AFA. Actually, the evangelical dominance in Colorado Springs that was especially apparent in the 80′s and 90′s has somewhat waned, but there is still a profoundly Christian outlook among many USAF officers. My friend, however, did not got to AFA, he’s an Aggie. This course actually makes perfect sense. Missile launch officers are charged with ‘turning keys’ on 10-50 megatons of ‘instant sunrise.’ That is a profoundly difficult thing to do, even if one is sure the US would never order such a launch unless a devastating attack had already been committed against the US. Many officers struggle with this. There are many training scenarios enacted to decondition officers to the difficulty of this act – there are many exercises run where the officers go through all the motions of launching the missiles, and in some of these exercises there is no advance notice that it is only a training exercise. As far as the men in the Launch Control Centers know, they are doing the ‘real thing.’ Having a thorough grounding in Just War theory can be a help to this predominately Christian group of men, to provide a philosophical basis that can clarify the justification for what they are being called to do. The fact that this very sensible training has now been called into question by those politically motivated forces that oppose any public religious act – no, that’s not right – any public exercise of Judeo-Christian religion, for they thoroughly endorse islam in the public square – is a tragedy and revealing of their undying hatred of Christianity in particular. In fact, the secular pagan left has become aware of the preponderance of Christians in the USAF leadership and has been waging a campaign against that preponderance for a decade or so now. Witness the construction of a “wicca” worship site on the Air Force Academy grounds in the last year or two – something that is frequented by maybe one or two possibly intentionally placed malcontents, but a dark stain of the pagan and satanic on a noble institution. There have been other lawsuits against USAF for retaining elements of the profoundly Christian character of this nation’s founding. The secular pagan left will not rest until it has completely squashed any remaining Christian character in the armed forces. The Navy is a sad example of where that will lead, with a collapse of morals in the service (over a dozen ship CO’s relieved of command this year alone for fornicating with subordinates on duty) and a further erosion of THE key component character of the formerly American ethos – Christianity.