Mea Culpa and Navy Seals

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – I’m a bigot.

Yes, it must be true and I’m as surprised as you are. But alas, I’m trying to come to grips with my own white supremacy.

In my defense I don’t live in a compound, I’m not a member of any conspiracy group, I don’t fly the Confederate flag, and I don’t have a cache of weapons hidden in my basement.

And once in a while I take the American flag down and fly a team flag for an important game. Had it up for the Eagles, but I had to put it at half-staff after the game.
But, of course, if 52 U.S. senators can be bigots, I guess I could be one, too; but no one has chased me into a ladies’ restroom taking pictures and shouting at me, nor has anyone picketed my house or blocked my car from leaving. But I know they are all bigots because Chuck Schumer said so, and he should know — he is, after all, the leader of the Senate.

So I’m still trying to figure out just when I became one and how anyone found out.

I’m wondering if it was when I expressed my belief that voter ID laws were important to our democracy. Apparently they are a detriment because I know now that they work to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. Silly me! I always thought those folks were capable of getting the necessary identification for themselves. I was sorry to find out that apparently they can’t figure out the process, and that’s a darn shame. I guess there is some type of natural inferiority that I never suspected they had.

Or it might have been when I told a pollster that I favored signature verification for absentee ballots. That would be where the signature on the ballot should match the signature on file in the election office and not the signature on the absentee ballot application like they did in Georgia last time. Sorry but I thought that was wrong, too. Apparently I was wrong again.

Mea culpa.

Maybe it’s the police flag in my yard. Apparently from what I hear cops are bigots, too. After all I’m learning how horrible they are, beating and shooting poor people. I know that because Nancy, Chuck, and Joe told me so. After all they are three of the wisest people in the United States and I should take to heart what they tell me.

They are now my friends because they pointed out my sins to me. Thank you, o great trinity, for saving a wretched soul like me.

*****

Last week on my radio program our guest was Jeremy Dys, special counsel for litigation with First Liberty who is participating in the representation of the 36 U.S. Navy Seals who challenged the military’s vaccine mandate.

The 36 had objected to the mandate on religious grounds — mostly having to do with the use of aborted fetal cells in the vaccine’s development. They had all sought a religious exemption to the requirement and while a small number of Navy personnel had received exemptions for other reasons, none of the 36 religious accommodation requests had been approved. In fact, the court found that “denial” had become the Navy’s default position to the religious exemption.

The Seals had also been threatened with discharge, possible criminal charges, court-martial, and reimbursing the Navy for all training expenses. Yet the government claimed that the Seals would not have been harmed by the mandate, a legal predicate that must be shown.

The judge, Reed O’Connor however, found differently stating:
“[The Seals] testify that they have been barred from official and unofficial travel, including for training and treatment for traumatic brain injuries; denied access to non-work activities, like family day; assigned unpleasant schedules and low-level work like cleaning; relieved of leadership duties and denied opportunities for advancement; kicked out of their platoons; and threatened with immediate separation. At least one Plaintiff has received an email for enrollment in the TAP course, a prerequisite for separation from the Navy.”

The Seals won a preliminary injunction against the government which, for now will allow them to stay on active duty — although not necessarily with special warfare units — pending a possible appeal by the administration. According to the court:

“Our nation asks the men and women in our military to serve, suffer, and sacrifice. But we do not ask them to lay aside their citizenry and give up the very rights they have sworn to protect….The Navy provides a religious accommodation process, but by all accounts, it is theater. The Navy has not granted a religious exemption to any vaccine in recent memory. It merely rubber stamps each denial. The Navy service members in this case seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect. The COVID-19 pandemic provides the government no license to abrogate those freedoms. There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution,” he added in his written ruling.

“To adjudicate a religious accommodation request, the Navy uses a six-phase, fifty-step process. Although ‘all requests for accommodation of religious practices are assessed on a case-by-case basis,’ Phase 1 of the Navy guidance document instructs an administrator to update a prepared disapproval template with the requester’s name and rank,” the judge wrote.

“What’s concerning to me, and we’ve seen this both in the military and private contexts, is that there seems to be a real desire to judge the sincerity of belief that people applying for these accommodations present, and that is something the Constitution, the courts has long held. It is not the domain of courts or employers,” Dys said.
The legal rule, he said, is that the employer is to take the reasons for the religious exemption request at face value and cannot sit in judgment of another’s belief or question its sincerity, he said.

Sounds to me like the rippling wave of anti-Christian bigotry that has consumed the Biden administration. Of course they’ll fight to keep people with strongly held religious beliefs outside the mainstream. And they’ve hinted they will continue to do so: several federal agencies are making lists of federal employees who have asked for their religious exemption. The documentation includes reasons for the request and the individual’s religious status.

You’ll hear more about this attack on our religious freedoms. Until, of course, government and big-tech shuts us down.

 

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday morning at 9:30 on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)