The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening to sue the U.S. Naval Academy unless it abolishes its daily lunchtime prayer, saying that some midshipmen have felt pressured to participate.
In a letter to the Naval Academy, Deborah Jeon, legal director for the ACLU of Maryland, said it was “long past time” for the academy to discontinue the tradition. She said the practice violates midshipmen’s freedom to practice religion as their conscience leads them.
The Naval Academy rejected the ACLU’s request that the prayer be eliminated.
“The academy does not intend to change its practice of offering midshipmen an opportunity for prayer or devotional thought during noon meal announcements,” the university said in a statement. It said that some form of prayer has been offered for midshipmen at meals since the school’s founding, in 1845, and that it is “consistent with other practices throughout the Navy.”
Now the ACLU is attacking an institution that trains future officers to defend a society that permits organizations such as as the ACLU to operate with great freedom.
So, as these midshipmen learn how to “…defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic…” they are being attacked by the ACLU, an organization that has been relentlessly attacking the roots and traditions of our society that caused the Costitution to exist in the first place.
Man the torpedoes: sink the ACLU
[i]some midshipmen have felt pressured to participate[/i]
Kids in a classroom I’ll buy, but midshipmen are young adults training for leadership in war. If they can’t stand up for themselves and their beliefs, they need to learn to do so.
If you are offended by mere words, you have no business in public, much more the military.
Stay at home. Knit. Craft. E-bay Store. It’s safer there.
What will be the Naval Academy’s official postion after January 20, 2009?
The ACLU is a stark raving mad organization whose noble history and ideals have been corrupted by wickedness. There is good news though: http://www.aclj.org/
The American Center for Law and Justice is a godly version of the ACLU. If you have not heard of them, do your soul a favor and look at all the good their doing!
Nobody in the Naval Academy was forced to be there, since we don’t have a draft. All there volunteered for service, and whether they were ‘sent’ to the academy or enrolled, that was the result of their choice making process.
The ACLU and other leftist groups have successfully breached the walls of all traditional American cultural institutions except the military. It is not surprising, then, that it’s the military’s turn to be brought to heel by the Left. Not satisfied with co-ed training and deployment; Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; sensitivity training; etc., liberals demand complete and unconditional surrender by the military to the secular progressive agenda. After all, the “mainstream” media, the Church and the academy have long since signed on to that agenda. Once the military gets on board, it will hasten the day the U.S. evolves into a nation no better that a third rate socialist European country which has ceded its sovereignty to the United Nations. And that, after all, is the ultimate dream of the Left–the end of American exceptionalism.
How about a silent time for ayone who claims to not be Christian but does believe in something. They could silently stand while prayers are offered for others and then dive in!!
As an alum of USNA I am offended that the ACLU seems to think the 1st Amendment only has an anti-establishment clause and not an anti-abridgement clause. To suggest that 99% of the 4000+ Brigade of Midshipmen should be denied their right to pray is ludicrous on its face. It is far easier for the nine to silently “not pray”.
Go Navy! Beat Arm…I mean ACLU!
The key to the ACLU’s success has always been the threat of a law suit. When an organization stands up to them, they, the ACLU, has a rather poor record of winning. There is no doubt in my mind that anti-ACLU law groups such as the ADF, Thomas More, Liberty Counsel, etc., will be standing in line to represent the Military. I say: bring it on!
H
There is a special circle of Hell reserved for ACLU lawyers. Very, very special indeed.
Mr. Matz, I too am a USNA alumnus (1998), and I find this more than a little disingenuous of those midshipmen who complain and of the ACLU. Unfortunately there are malcontents in all walks of life. When I was there, we had several folks who didn’t participate in noon prayer. The same is true of the evening prayer aboard the ships on which I served. I didn’t participate when our Muslim chaplain prayed the evening prayer on my last ship, and I never felt pressured to do so.
At USNA, I distinctly remember being instructed to simply stand at parade rest if you didn’t care to pray. The prayers I recall were ecumenical enough to have almost no gravity anyway. As one of my fellow alums wrote to me today in an email, “As for depth of religion, they might as well change the words from God to Tecumseh.”
Of course, I’m a student at Nashotah now and was never given an option to simply stand at parade rest. I wonder if the ACLU would have a problem with that.
God bless and Go Navy,
Marcus
Ironically, Congress authorized the creation of the various chaplain corps for the military and institutionalized a multi-denominational religious system to ensure the free exercise of 1st amendment rights for those serving. Now, the ACLU wants to infringe on rights of the majority to serve the desires of one sixth of a percent of the Navy’s personnel (based on 2001 statistics).
An Air Force Academy graduate, Mickey Weinstein, has been pushing this issue for years and views the removal of prayer from non-religious government events (such as USNA lunch or graduation ceremonies) as the first step in abolishing the Chaplain Corps and creating a complete separation of Church and State. Even in those cases in which he has gotten some margin of victory (notably USAFA 2004), he has not been able to get the courts to abolish prayer at government secular events. If only more Christians had his zeal.