05/03/13 – Mikey Weinstein – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
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All right, our next guest is Mikey Weinstein from Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that's militaryreligiousfreedom.org.
Good to talk to you again, Mikey, welcome back.
Very glad to be here, Scott.
And guys, I gotta tell you, we're in the middle of a media storm, so I've only got a few minutes, but I did want to do the show.
Okay, good deal.
Well, yeah, I imagine you must be in the middle of a media storm, because I saw on Facebook this morning that you and Barack Obama, apparently both being atheist, communist, conservative Muslims, have outlawed Christianity in the military.
How dare you?
And you forgot that we also kick dogs and are mean to our mothers.
Which really, what is the matter with you?
Mean to your mother?
I mean, come on.
I know, I know.
It's just, you know, the problem is that, you know, the old saying about you have to consider the source.
You know, we're dealing with the echo chamber of the extreme right wing, you know, fundamentalist Christian media.
The nice thing is, is that in the state of Texas, we have our lead litigators, and as we speak, they are reviewing all the specifics so that we can hopefully file a massive defamation lawsuit against these monstrosities for lying about a thousand lies about me being an anti-Christian extremist, our organization being leftist, me being an atheist, all of these evil things.
And so, you know, we'll do what we can.
All right.
Well, so set it straight.
What's your philosophical background and what's your bent?
Why are you so anti-Christian, quote unquote?
Well, the bottom line, of course, we're not.
I represent the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
For your listeners, we're at militaryreligiousfreedom.org.
We represent, as of an hour ago, 33,116 active duty United States sailors, soldiers, Marines, pilots, and airmen, cadets and midshipmen at West Point, the Air Force Academy, which is my alma mater, and the alma mater of four of my children, as well as my brother-in-law.
My brother went there as well, and Annapolis, which is where my dad went.
Ninety-six percent of our clients are either Protestant or Roman Catholic.
We represent 11.8 percent of all Muslim Americans in the military, and we represent 801 LGBT clients.
So given the fact that most of our staff, the vast majority of our clients and our donors are all Christians, it's a little, not a little, I guess it's a huge universe of falsehoods and lies to be saying the things that we're saying.
And all we're doing with the Department of Defense is saying there's nothing new.
We're saying there are laws against, there's a time, place, and manner in which you can proselytize, and we totally support that.
But when you do it outside of the U.S. Constitution, and it's construing federal and state case laws, Scott, or in violation of Department of Defense directives, people need to be severely punished.
If there is an interstate in your state of Texas, and the speed limit is 75, if people do 150 with impunity and no one ever gets arrested or gets stopped, you could be given a ticket.
Well, if you have a law on the books that is followed, observed more in its breach than in its compliance, it's worse than if you never have a law to begin with.
So do you understand me?
Sure.
All right, now here's the thing about this.
If you're in the military, then, you know, other than on your R&R breaks or whatever, after 24 hours, your life is in government employment.
So it's easy to understand that, hey, we don't want, you know, our, say, our state government having an official religion of this, that, the other thing over civilians, that kind of deal.
But what about, don't military men have the right to their private religion even while they're in this public employment?
And this is what's really going around on Facebook, the rumor and the, I guess, surely you'd call it the smear going around, is that basically you're trying to define proselytizing so broad that it includes, you know, a sergeant and his men taking a knee and praying for a minute before they go out risking their lives, killing people and stuff.
And so...
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, bear with me.
We are doing that only if the sergeant orders all of his men to do it.
If the sergeant says, you know, in other words, if men are being ordered, if the sergeant says, look, for anybody, you know, we're about to go out on a mission, if anybody wants to do this, I'm going to be doing this right now, you can come join me, as opposed to take a knee and let us give a prayer to Jesus to protect all of us.
That is a violation of their oath to the Constitution.
If it's not, if the question comes down to what is voluntary and what's mandatory in a military context, Scott, fair question, how long have you been in the U.S. military or have you ever been in?
No, I've never been in the military.
The military is...
You're a military superior, Scott, and for Scott's listeners, that is not your shift manager at Starbucks or KFC or Walgreens.
The military is a peculiarly and acutely tribal, adversarial, communal and ritualistic environment.
So what is voluntary and what's not voluntary, I mean, you can have, you know, a time when you have, you know, mandatory religious, you can have religious services, and then you can have your own time to yourself, but you cannot force people to attend or be part of a mandatory military formation where you order them to pray to anybody's God, except in our case, it's almost always with our clients, it is a version of, a very militarized, militant, weaponized version of Christianity, Google this, listeners, known as Dominion Christianity.
So our point is that the laws are out there, it's much like smoking, 30 years ago you could smoke in the workplace, now you can't, because secondhand smoke kills people, but do smokers have rights?
Yes, in the workplace, they can wear a nicotine patch, they can chew nicotine gum, which is much like having your own personal prayer to yourself, right, in the analogy, or they can go to a designated smoking area, which is like going to a chapel, but their personal rights to smoke will never trump the rights of their fellow workers not to have to breathe in their secondhand smoke, but in our U.S. Constitution, there is no separation between tobacco and state.
There is between church and state.
We just finished handling a case for an evangelical member of the military who was upset that his superior officer, on his car, had a Jesus fish symbol, you're familiar?
With the stickers, not that case, though, no.
No, no, Scott, I'm just, the symbol, the fish symbol that you see on cars, that's right.
Well, this officer had the word Satan inside of it.
Our client, as an evangelical Christian, was horrified about that, he went to the base chaplains and the base lawyers and they said, sorry, that's the superior, that's your commander's First Amendment right.
The sergeant said, I don't like this, I'm going to see Mikey, I'm going to contact Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and they were, they gasped, they said, oh my God, he hates Christians, you're crazy.
He came to us and we agreed with him that that was denigrating to the Christian faith.
We had to go all the way to the Pentagon, it took three weeks, but the commander was ordered to take the sticker off his car or never drive it on base again.
So there is a time, place, and manner in which we can totally support this, but doing it in the workplace, on time, is not just inappropriate, it's illegal, and people need to be punished for it.
Yeah, but see, this is kind of what I mean, is that, it seems like, I mean, this is a guy's personal car, right?
Would you have taken a different stand if he had just been a private or a specialist?
It matters that he was the boss of others?
Oh, it's the whole universe, my brother.
It's the whole universe.
He's the commander.
It's, I mean, you don't understand the military as a heavily vertically encrusted environment.
It's with, you know, you have this draconian specter of military command influence.
Unless you've been in, I'm sure some of your listeners have been in, I've said before, not your shift manager at Starbucks.
However, if you were in, you ask the general counsels of the Fortune 1000 companies, if even a summer college intern is being proselytized to during the workday in the mail room, they will drop to their knees to avoid a lawsuit about that.
You can't, that violates Title VII of the U.S. Code.
You can't do it.
We're not stopping soldiers or Marines from praying.
We're stopping them from ordering others to join them in their type of a prayer.
Right.
All right.
Now, here's what's hilarious.
Christians being in the military at all.
Why would a Christian have a job killing people?
Check it out.
There are about 41,000 different denominations of Christianity, literally.
So when you say Christian, which one?
I mean, come on, man, that's a lot.
So, you know, I mean, it is what it is.
Hey, I got 60 seconds left.
You've been so kind on this call and your questions, by the way, are fabulous, I must say.
Thank you for giving me the chance to talk about.
I was on The O'Reilly Show last night and, you know, his questions were about one tenth as good as yours.
So in the last 60 seconds, is there anything else I can try to answer for you, sir?
Well, I guess I'm not sure if we really got to the heart of what's changed recently.
That's such a big deal.
Nothing has changed.
Where do you live?
Austin?
Yeah.
Imagine the police department, the police chief and the district attorney in Austin holding a news conference today, and you have to be there.
You have a radio show.
They go, we are announcing today that we are going to arrest and prosecute anybody who breaks the law.
Wow.
What news that is.
What news?
Nothing has changed.
These laws have always been on the books.
This is a canard, a straw man.
It's a house of cards put up by the extreme religious right and their lying machine.
All right, thanks, Miley.
Your absolute nothing has changed.
We're not doing anything.
We're just telling the Pentagon, if someone, again, is prophetizing, you know, follow your own internal regulations and the U.S. Constitution.
Everyone who works at Taco Bell doesn't have to swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, but you do if you're in the military.
We're saying, follow, support your oath.
Stop when you tell someone in the military, which happens every second of every day, that you lack intelligence, dignity, worth, character, and honor because of your chosen religious faith or lack thereof.
Why, Scott?
There's no difference between that and telling someone they're stupid because of the color of their skin or because they were born a woman.
Most of our clients are Presbyterian, Lutheran.
We have 21 different varieties of Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Mormon.
And we get over to the Catholics before I ever get to the Jews, the Muslims, the atheists, or the agnostics.
I appreciate your time very much.
Grateful.
Very grateful to you.
Thank you.
Everybody, that is Mikey Weinstein.
The website is militaryreligiousfreedom.org.
Militaryreligiousfreedom.org.
And he's the author of With God on Our Side and No Snowflake in an Avalanche.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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