Air Force Co-sponsors Memorial Day Event with Evangelical Groups...Where's the News?
By Lee Russ
Saturday, May 26, 2007 at 08:50 PM
Truthout and other sites are reporting that the official publication of the Robins Air Force Base describes an event called "Salute To The Troops, Memorial Day Celebration" as being "an official US Air Force 60th Anniversary event."
Anniversary event."
Which would be strange, given that the event, scheduled for May 26-28 at Georgia's Stone Mountain Park, is also sponsored by Task Force Patriot USA, an evangelical organization, and LifeWay Christian Resources, the publishing house of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).Truthout focuses on the reaction of various watchdog groups, including Americans United for Separation of Church and State, whose director, Barry Lynn, sent a letter of complaint to Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and Acting Secretary of the Army Peter Geren.
If that aspect interests you, follow the link above. What I find equally interesting, however, is that, strangely, it's pretty hard to find any info on this event on the web. The few mentions of it that I could find refer you over to the site of "Task Force Patriot" but the links to that site now take you to www.bizland.com/errors/bizland/bandwidth.html, where you get a nice error message that "Our site is temporarily unavailable, but will be back online shortly."
A Google news search turned up two entries on CNSNews.com, and each of the result summaries clearly includes info on Salute to the Troops, Memorial Day Celebration. But when you click the link to go to the CNSNews pages where these mentions are made, the pages contain nothing at all about Salute to the Troops, Memorial Day Celebration.
Now you see it, now you don't.
Comments
I'm wondering why any religious events are held on military posts, forts and bases? Think of all the money that could be saved by removing chapels from government property and not having to pay religious rip-off artists to hold services there.
Millions could be saved in future construction and expenses caused by religion, and which has no place on government property. There are plenty of civilian churches for soldiers to go to, in the event they are brainwashed to believe in religion.
Unlike common sense atheists and our party, in general.
At this point in time, I'd be happy to see the Air Force stop acting as a branch of Evangelical Christianity. Are you aware of the many incients at the Air Force Academy where officers and staff there have pushed Christianity on the cadets?
And I would like to know what happened to all the internet references to the "Salute To The Troops, Memorial Day Celebration."
According to WaPo there was a compromise reached.
Considering the unswavering Christian bent to a lot of the so called contractors in Iraq and termes like operation "infinite mercy" and people throwing the word "crusade" around it's starting to look like a lot of folk in the US who support the war in Iraq are doing so because of fundamentalist interpretations of biblical doctrine.
The wall seperating Church and State has been slowly and deliberately dismantled under Bush. Faith Based Initiatives, Absitinance only education, vouchers to make it easier to send kids to religious schools, putting a regent University alumni in charge of placing fundie lawyer types like MoniGoo all throughout the DOJ hve all lead to this moment.
Bush himself sed that he didn't consider an athiest a real American.
Allowing or encouraging these ties between religious fervor and patriotism is yet another sign how things are changing for the worse in the US.
Fighting extremism with extremism is really dumb.
Be Well.