From The Other 98% on Facebook:
A "middle finger to the United States Constitution," Pete Hegseth has wiped 180 faiths off the Pentagon's official list, the largest religious purge in modern U.S. military history.
The memo dropped May 20 under the signature of Anthony Tata, the Pentagon personnel chief once pulled from a Senate hearing over his Islamophobic posts.
It erases Atheists, Humanists, Pagans, Druids, Wiccans, Heathens, Asatru, Unitarian Universalists, Deists, Spiritualists and dozens more from the dog tag system soldiers use to access spiritual care in war.
What survives? Every flavor of Christianity, plus Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism. Funny how the axe never seems to fall on the faiths Hegseth and his pastor friends approve.
About those pastor friends. Doug Wilson, the Idaho Christian nationalist who supports repealing women's right to vote and believes homosexuality should be a crime, led a worship service at the Pentagon at Hegseth's invitation this winter, broadcast live on the department's internal TV channel.
Hegseth has rebranded the Department of Defense as the "Department of War" and declared that military chaplains are "first and foremost called and ordained by God." That is the man writing the rules for which god counts.
A serving Army chaplain who spoke anonymously to Military.com said the new list violates the Constitution he swore to defend.
A combat veteran ordained as a Wiccan priest, Druid, and Asatru Gothi warned that stripping minority codes abandons traumatized service members inside the very chaplaincy meant to heal them.
Mikey Weinstein, who runs the Military Religious Freedom Foundation on behalf of more than 100,000 troops, called the new list "a middle finger to the United States Constitution."
The Department of Veterans Affairs still recognizes more than 220 belief systems and has more than 80 emblems for headstones. So a pagan Marine can be buried under the symbol of her faith. She just cannot live under it.
This is establishment religion in slow motion. A Christian nationalist runs the Pentagon. He hosts Christian-only services on government property. He starts erasing every belief that does not match his theology.
He calls it streamlining.
Tell every veteran you know. They swore the oath for the First Amendment. Not for one man's Bible.
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