Missing Bibles at veteran POW memorials
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May is “National Military Appreciation Month.” However, in addition to crippling our great veterans’ needed mental and physical care through Veterans Administration medical facilities, the feds are also restricting their access to spiritual resources and simultaneously defiling our tributes to them.
As I wrote in my C-Force health and fitness column this week, in response to the growing needs of veterans returned from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with aging Vietnam veterans needing more health care, employees at 40 VA medical facilities in 19 states and Puerto Rico have instead regularly taken to falsifying veteran wait times; in effect “zeroing” them out. In some cases, investigators found manipulation had been going on for as long as a decade, according to USA Today, which initiated the probe. More than 480,000 veterans were waiting more than 30 days for an appointment as of March 15, according to public VA data obtained by USA Today.
Now, to add insult to injury, someone is also mocking our great veterans’ spiritual privations and memory by concealing Bibles and desecrating their memorials.
Back on Feb. 29, Todd Starnes, host of Fox News & Commentary radio, reported that “a Bible and Bible verse were removed from a POW/MIA display inside an [Akron] Ohio Veteran’s Administration clinic.”
On Apr. 6, Military.com reported that a second VA clinic in Youngstown, Ohio, “substituted a ‘prop’ book for a Bible … at a table set up to honor American prisoners of war and missing in action,” known as “Missing Man” tables.
On April 19, the Army Times reported: “
- fficials at Tobyhanna Army Depot removed a Bible with the depot’s name on its cover from a prisoner-of-war memorial display in the installation’s administration building about 24 hours after receiving a complaint [about it].”
Also in April, senior staff at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, Texas, also removed the Bible from its POW/MIA “Missing Man” Memorial without a direct demand to do so.
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The ACLJ explained: “Missing Man tables are a deeply significant tradition honoring military POW and MIAs. Generally, these tables include numerous symbols such as a white cloth, a single red rose, a slice of lemon, salt, a candle, an inverted glass, an empty chair, and a Bible. Each item holds special significance, and the Bible represents the ‘strength gained through faith to sustain us and those lost from our country, founded as one nation under God.'”
On April 28, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Rep. J. Randy Forbes, R-Va., co-chairmen of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, sent a letter to the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs on behalf of 10 other senators and 31 members of the House who were seeking answers as to why Bibles have been removed from Missing Man Table displays at VA clinics around the country.
This type of religious neutering among the military is now new. I wrote back in March 2014 that, under the Obama regime, myriad of Christian omissions have been made within all the branches: Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines.
It comes as no surprise to the astute observer of politics that, over the past eight years, the religious whitewashing of Judeo-Christian heritage has escalated at the same time that the president has been continually advocating Muslim mingling and missions.
As I have to do a few times a year, I need to remind and sometimes educate people that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t prohibit such practices as placing a Bible in a public or government Veteran display; it actually protects the practice.
Atheists and other progressives would have you believe that the First Amendment establishes an impenetrable and impassable “separation of church and state.” But that phrase appears nowhere in the First Amendment, which actually reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. …”
The ACLU and like-minded groups – such as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation – are not preserving First Amendment rights. They are perverting the meaning of the Establishment Clause (which was to prevent the creation of a single national church like the Church of England) to deny the Free Exercise Clause (which preserves our rights to exercise our religious freedoms as we want, privately and publicly). Both clauses were intended to safeguard religious liberty, not to circumscribe its practice. The framers were seeking to guarantee freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
My brother, Wieland, who was a God-fearing Christian man, died fighting in Vietnam. His name is etched alongside 58,000 other fallen warriors on the Vietnam Wall Memorial in Washington, D.C. He would roll in his grave to know that the freedoms he fought for were being trampled by secular progressives.
As we embrace “National Military Appreciation Month” and come up on another Memorial Day in a few weeks, we can do far better for our fallen heroes than to desecrate their Missing Man displays, which were set up to be a tribute to them.
Please write the secretary of veteran affairs and your own representatives as well as the White House to voice your opinion about the assault on religious liberty occurring among our military and across our land, and share what you think should be done about it.
You can call the Department of Veterans Affairs at these toll-free numbers or write the secretary of veteran affairs at:
The Honorable Robert McDonald, Secretary
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
810 Vermont Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20420
You can also reach the White House at (202) 456-1111 or by emailing the president.
Our next president should be a constitutional advocate of religious freedom, and never be ashamed to express his own faith and encourage others to do the same, just as president Franklin Roosevelt did.
Before the start of World War II, then-Commander in Chief Roosevelt, actually wrote the prologue in the Gideon Bibles given to the armed forces, encouraging them to find strength and courage from its contents.
Roosevelt penned these words: “As commander-in-chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries, men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel, and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength, and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul.”
If I were secretary of Veteran Affairs or the next president, I’d order senior officials at every VA clinic across the country to put copies of those Roosevelt Bibles on Missing Man tables.
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/missing-bibles-at-veteran-pow-memorials/#CvpDvDXF63RSA8Ip.99
