As Memorial Day Weekend 2015 continues on this Sunday Morning, across the world, brave men and women, in service to our country, gather to worship the One Who made them.
They are led by a devoted team of men and women, known as “Chaplains”.
Now, these Men and Women of God are under attack, by the very Administration, who is supposed to be supporting them.
Fox News Insider reported in an article, posed on April 26th, that
Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) recently went to bat for an Army chaplain who he claims was wrongly punished for using religion in counseling services.Chaplain Joseph Lawhorn was issued a Letter of Concern that accused him of advocating for Christianity during a suicide prevention training session at the University of North Georgia last November.
Collins, an Air Force reserve chaplain who served in Iraq and who represents Georgia’s 9th congressional district, joined Anna Kooiman on “Fox and Friends Weekend” to share insight on what he sees as a larger movement against religion in the U.S. military.
Collins asserted that the Army’s refusal to remove the Letter of Concern from Lawhorn’s file is indicative of the military’s efforts to intimidate chaplains into not expressing their faith and doing the job they’re supposed to be doing.
“I think right now what we’re dealing with is people who claim to be tolerant are actually the most intolerant, especially when they have beliefs they truly don’t believe in,” Collins said. “Chaplains are there for everyone, whether they have faith or no faith, and the chaplains need to be able to operate under their own faith background and also operate within the military. And right now they seem to be under attack for doing just that.”
“We’re in an environment where our military needs to always be at the top of readiness, and readiness means not only physical well-being but also mental and spiritual well-being. And so that’s why it is important that chaplains are able to continue their role in the guidelines that have already been set forth,” Collins said.
“What you have now is basically a minority group that says this shouldn’t be part of the military.”
The Tyranny of the Minority, Indeed.
As I have written numerous times, especially during the last two years of the Obama Administration, the Faith of Christian Americans has been relentlessly attacked, with Christians basically being considered an “Enemy of the State”
Eric Metaxas nailed the matter in the following article, posted at ChristianPost.com:
In the first century, Jesus was asked whether the Jewish people, who were under pagan, Roman occupation, should pay taxes to Caesar. The Lord, of course, said we are to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. But in 21st century America, Caesar is angling for a better deal—and he’s getting it.
Our old friend Chuck Colson sounded the alarm several years ago when certain political figures on the Left—including former secretary of state Hillary Clinton—began downsizing the First Amendment’s guarantee of our God-given right to freedom of religion into a more manageable “freedom of worship.”
Chuck feared—rightly, it turns out—that opponents of religious liberty were seeking to keep religion within the four walls of our churches, synagogues, and mosques—as if religious belief were no more than a purely private opinion with no practical implications for the real world. In other words, “Feel free to worship, if you like, but keep your religiously informed opinions and actions to yourself.”
It’s a totalitarian impulse, and you can see it in the intensifying efforts to force faith groups to pay for abortions, to shut down Christian businesses that don’t want to participate in so-called “gay weddings,” and so on.
And the totalitarians are getting bolder about it. In Victoria, Australia, doctors are required by law to perform abortions when asked, or refer the patient to a colleague who will. In Canada, meanwhile, the Ontario and Saskatchewan Colleges of Doctors and Surgeons want physicians forced to perform euthanasia—which is now a fundamental national “right”—if no one else is available to do it.
And the totalitarians—being totalitarians—will brook no compromise. According to Canadian bioethicist Udo Schuklenk, “The very idea that we ought to countenance conscientious objection in any profession is objectionable.”
Really? And alas, this totalitarian streak is not confined to the Great White North. Mrs. Clinton, who once said that abortion can be “a sad, even tragic choice,” now asserts that a so-called “right to reproductive health care” trumps religious freedom. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will,” she said at a recent meeting of the Women in the World Summit. “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Religious beliefs have to be changed?
Now Caesar seeks to regulate not just our actions, but our thoughts as well!
New York Times columnist and gay-rights advocate Frank Bruni thinks we need to change our religious beliefs about marriage, too—since, he says, interpreting the Bible is filled with subjectivity and uncertainty. Therefore believers shouldn’t take it too literally on matters of sexuality. “So our debate about religious freedom,” Bruni says, “should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.”
How nice that Mr. Bruni and other sexual totalitarians stand ready to “free us” from our prejudices. What’s next, re-education camps? If you think I’m exaggerating the totalitarian threat, in the same newspaper, David Brooks writes, “If orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all.”
My Earthly Father, whom I shall write more about, tomorrow, was the greatest, most wonderful man, I have ever known.
It was not just because he served in World War II, nor was it the fact that he brought home to me malted milk balls, warm cashews, or chocolate-covered raisins every Friday Night from the Sears Store where he worked.
He led me to Jesus Christ.
It was not just by his words, or the fact that he made sure that I was in Sunday School, every Sunday Morning. And, it wasn’t just the fact that some of my earliest memories of him revolve around listening to his beautiful Tenor Voice, echo through the kitchen, while he sang “The Old Rugged Cross”, as he made my breakfast.
He raised me, my sister, and my step-sister, in “the way in which we should go”.
By now. you’re probably asking, “So what’s the point of all this, KJ?”
On this Memorial Day Weekend, as we remember the sacrifices made by our Brightest and Best, we need to remember those who stand by their side, in the Field of Battle, armed with the Word of God, and a message of Love, Hope, and Fidelity.
America’s Chaplain Corps are out there making a daily difference in the lives of or brave Fighting Men and Women.
Their “Charge to Keep” transcends the cultural shackles imposed upon them by an Administration bowing at the altar of Political Correctness and Political Expediency.
We are given free will by our Creator…will to make choices and decisions on the direction of our lives. Being human, we often don’t make the right decisions and being human, those decisions have the potential to lead us down a dark path.
Whether is in the heat of combat on foreign shores, in the oppressive reality of our humdrum civilian lives, or strictly in the close quarters of our own consciousness, the path we choose to follow is up to us.
However, others, like the Chaplain Corps, our parents, family, and friends, can make a difference in our journey.
I thank God that through His Grace I was given a Father who made sure that I received loving instruction in The Way in which I should go.
We still live in the greatest country on the face of the earth and we still have a responsibility to one another.
The Light or the Darkness. The choice is up to each and every one of us.
America’s Chaplain Corps remain an integral part of the battle for America’s Soul.
Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. 1 John 4:14 (ESV)
Until He Comes,
KJ
Kingsjester's Blog 