The Washington Post made a fool of its corporate self by starting a website called “On Faith” and putting at its head the secularist Sally Quinn. Oh, she claims to be interested by religion – just as King Herod thought Christ’s miracles sounded amusing, like he was a hippie magician like Doug Henning.
In Saturday’s paper, Quinn turned dead serious about sexual assault in the military, even asserting that “sexual assault is part of the military culture.” Naturally, Quinn puts a huge part of the blame on Christians, and the infection of their organizing groups in the military:
That is not going to be a cakewalk. Take the Cadets for Christ, a religious group at the Air Force Academy. According to Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, it espouses the idea of “the shepherding movement for female cadets. [The women] must be shepherded by males, even lower-ranking males. They are told that their value is that they have eggs. They are asked, ‘What are you doing here? This is not want Jesus wants.’ ”
Weinstein has letters from parents of female cadets testifying to these accounts. Years ago, even Pat Robertson denounced this group’s tactics.
If this is a tolerated group at the Air Force Academy (and the other military academies are not much better), how can anybody, even the president, demand zero tolerance overnight? The fact is, he can try. But nobody is going to pay attention. Not until people start going to jail.
According to a document on the MRFF site with an anonymous author, Pat Robertson denounced a “shepherding” movement in ... 1975. But here’s a flavor of the anti-“theocracy” fervor of the MRFF, charging a hide-your-kids plot
to “religionize” the US Armed Forces as part of their plan to eventually control it and establish a theocracy in this nation, complete with their own Sharia-like “Biblical” laws – including public floggings, stoning, and swording of alleged “offenders” – who would include “blasphemers” adulterers, homosexuals, “incorrigible” juveniles, and (in a stunning demonstration of how insane these fanatical zealots really are) women wearing red dresses, and failure to keep a kosher kitchen!
This is the fever swamp where Quinn routinely visits in her Post columns, where “Onward Christian Soldiers” it the soundtrack of the villains. After going after the evangelical Christians, Quinn also threw in this mean-spirited attack on the Catholics:
Where are the thousands of people who are perpetrating these acts? Why are they still in the military? Why aren’t a lot of them in jail?
It seems that the military thinks it does not have to be held to the same standards as civilians when it comes to sexual assault. The Catholic Church, with its lineup of sexual-predator priests, has the same view. How many priests have been jailed?
Thanks for being so on top of the news, Sally: start with William Lynn, who was just put in prison for covering up sex abuse.
Quinn also shows shock and outrage that anyone would suggest that today's military recruits might just come from a secular "hookup culture" where the sex is easy to come by with enough braggadocio. Let's posit that Sally isn't exactly listening to rap music and going to high-school proms and watching the dance floor. But she's so incensed anyone would "distract" from blaming the Christians that she highlights her anger in capital letters, like a crank writing about fluoridation of the water supply.
Quinn also turned to another Weinstein rant on April 26 to pin military sex assault on the Christians:
"This is a national security threat. What is happening [aside from sexual assault] is spiritual rape. And what the Pentagon needs to understand is that it is sedition and treason. It should be punished."
...The proselytizing they referred to is primarily from "dominionist" or fundamentalist evangelical Christians. Weinstein's organization has 33,000 clients, and 96 percent are Christian. [!!] These clients come to him to complain about having their religious freedom undermined in some way.
The most recent outrage, he said, was reported by a West Point cadet who wrote to Weinstein to say that after the Boston bombings, an active-duty instructor said in class that he would "bet his life on the Muslims having been behind it like they always are. It's always the Muslims and everyone knows it, and everybody is afraid to say it. Well, I am not."
Weinstein's hearsay evidence is always welcome in her kangaroo court. Quinn seemed not to be embarrassed that in the Boston case, the death and amputation came from Islamists.
Can't it simply be stated that as Quinn & Weinstein charge Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, their ardor has a distinct odor of Christophobia? Or should we just upset Sally by telling her she's being very effectively "shepherded" by her male source?
Quinn also echoed the Mikey Weinstein line in a May 2 column on the National Day of Prayer (which she finds oppressive):
The military is obviously different from the rest of the country. In the military, the subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to attend a prayer breakfast is enormous, and a person’s career can be seriously hurt by not participating.
It’s hard to believe that this was the basis for having a National Day of Prayer. This country was founded on the idea of religious freedom. But shoving one’s beliefs down the throat of all Americans is just the opposite. [Greg] Laurie and [David] Barton are so far from the mainstream that they are representative of only a very few Christians in this country, not to mention those of other faiths and no faith.
Whatever happened to inclusiveness and pluralism?
This is why Quinn should never be put in charge of a website called “On Faith.” She’s routinely hostile to it. The Post would be much more accurate to call it “On Inclusiveness and Pluralism.” It could be just as deliciously inaccurate as NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
Then it could just be humorous when it tilts demonstrably toward the secular-fundamentalist Left, since this is the intellectual territory where liberal arrogance moons the political world. “We’re inclusive and pluralistic and respectful and diverse! Unlike you conservatives, who can just shut up."
