The ACLU has picked the wrong fight this time. God Bless The American Legion, ADF and especially those Greatest Americans whose memory these two organizations have come out strong to defend.

ArrMatey at Court Zero covers an absurd result of ACLU litigation against the harmless Mojave Cross: The Forbidden Mojave Desert Cross

See more here at Stop the ACLU.

American Legion and ADF to ACLU, FFRF, AU, American Atheists and friends: Step away from the war memorials

About time someone goes on offense.

CNS News: Christians, Veterans Team Up to Protect Religious Memorials

The nation’s largest veterans’ service organization is teaming up with two Christian legal groups in an effort aimed at protecting Christian-themed war memorials from lawsuits that would remove them from public property.

The American Legion is asking its members to contribute to a catalog of war memorials that feature crosses and other religious symbols. The group will monitor its database of memorials and will notify the Alliance Defense Fund and the Liberty Legal Institute of any attempts by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and similar groups to challenge their constitutionality.

The effort stems from recent attempts by the ACLU to have crosses removed from memorials in Mt. Soledad, Calif., and in the Mojave Desert.

On the ACLU’s Docket of Depravity, these attacks are second in loathesomeness only to the ACLU’s vigorous defense of child molesters who want to hang out in parks to fantasize about toddlers, child porn consumers and child-rape how-to guide authors. Thanks to the Legion and ADF for drawing the line in the sand.

Thanks also to Annie Laurie Gaylor who unwittingly affirms the importance of the joint project by admitting that she is all too ready to bulldoze any veterans’ memorial that happen to “offend” her:

” I would not jump into the fray until we see what happens with these other cases [Mt. Soledad and Mojave Desert],” Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said, adding that “the ACLU might feel the same way: Let’s wait and see.”

A spokesman for the ACLU did not respond to requests for comment Friday. [Glib Note: Shocking!]

“There isn’t a way to address all of them,” Gaylor told Cybercast News Service. “You have to take these violations one case at a time, and we are facing a very hostile Supreme Court.

“If it wasn’t the current court, I would have no concern that this could possibly be upheld,” she said, “but with this new court, we don’t know how they’re behaving, but they seem to be behaving very badly on separation of church and state.”

Gaylor called the land-transfer attempts to protect the two crosses “despicable” and criticized Congress for getting involved in local cases.

“They have gone out of their way in Congress getting into the act. It’s just been a very sobering education about the lack of understanding of separation of church and state and the willingness to be manipulative and to try to subvert the First Amendment.”

She said war memorials that feature religious symbols are offensive and unconstitutional because “it isn’t the business of our secular government to have any opinion … on religion, much less plant crosses on the highest point in any city and put it as part of a government park.”

If there was “a way to address them all,” I’m sure she’d buy the wrecking ball and dismantle every memorial that carries any religious symbol. Echos of the Taliban demolishing those millennium-old Buddhist statues…

No one is dishonored or “excluded” (and no one’s “rights” have been violated) when fallen American heroes are remembered by a cross or a Bible verse or a Star of David or whatever religious symbol those who dedicate the monument choose to include. The ultimate sacrifice and the men themselves are dishonored by the radical secularists who have no love or understanding of the US Constitution (I’d say a large proportion of them despise this country) and who campaign through the courts to erase even small remembrances of the bravest citizens who died for the very freedoms these extremists abuse.

Thanks to Glib Fortuna. 

Said Cao @ 4:25 am | Permalink   

1. Go get em’ Legion…….guess it is time to renew my membership.

   Comment by Richard Nixon — 5/24/2007 @ 6:39 am

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2. Hey, just a question. You wouldn’t happen to have an e-mail address for anyone who is with the aclu, would you? I would LOVE to ask them to interpret the following quote, “CONGRESS shall make NO LAW, respecting an establishment of religion, or PROHIBITING THE FREE EXERCISE THEREOF,”

   I cannot help but ask where the LAW passed by CONGRESS is that REQUIRES people who see those crosses to observe the Christian faith is……….

   Comment by Smokey — 5/24/2007 @ 2:57 pm

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3. Well, it’s one thing if these decisions weren’t effecting other people, then I would give a rip.

   But Lori Piestawa and Jessica Lynch paid a terrible price for these disastrous policies; and their MOSs were cook and file clerk. The government should not have exposed them to a life or death situation.

   Take, for example, the fact that women have 50-60% upper body strength to that of a man.

   Because of the biological differences, the army has taken to gender norming (changing and lowering the physical requirements to accommodate women), which is in essence, making lab experiments that supposedly will prove that men and women are equal. Of course, they’re not, the average woman is a fraction of the size and weight of an average man.

   The military is full of standards of excellence which have been watered down because of fear of the radical feminists.

   We recognize male strength in sports, do you see a single woman on the football field during the Superbowl?

   And why is that? Are we recognizing there that a woman is no match for a 350 lb. linebacker?

   And wouldn’t you think that this type of comparison would be even more crucial, important and mean more during wartime when women are frighteningly close to being engaged in combat like Piestawa and Lynch were?

   And do you think the terrorists perhaps see a propaganda value in taking women hostage? And raping, sodomizing and beating them into splinters to the horror of our western sensibilities?

   “…[I]t is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men… All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft”

   — The Declaration of Feminism, November 1971.

   Feminists are merely apparatchiks.

   “Like Marxism, feminism can explain everything from advertising to religion by following its single thread, the oppression of women.”

   — Carol Iannone, “The Feminist Confusion,”
   Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties
   eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz
   (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1989), P. 149.

   From NRO:

   May 12, 2005, 8:14 a.m.
   A Man’s Job
   Ground combat is more than just a “women’s issue.”

   An excerpt:

   On January 13, 1994, then-secretary of defense Les Aspin issued regulations prohibiting the assignment of women to units that engage in direct ground combat, e.g., infantry and armor. In his memo to the Services, Aspin said that “women should be excluded from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground,” defined as “engaging an enemy on the ground with individual or crew-served weapons, while being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact with the hostile force’s personnel.” This prohibition extended to the support units that were collocated with direct ground combat forces as well.

   These regulations are still in effect. But the U.S. Army has violated these regulations without the notification required by current law, which requires the secretary of defense to provide formal advance notice to Congress of policy changes regarding female soldiers, accompanied by an analysis of proposed revisions on women’s exemption from Selective Service obligations.

   In an attempt to make its units more “expeditionary,” the Army has developed a new concept that permits the deployment and employment of self-contained formations tasked organized for specific combat tasks. The 3rd Infantry Division, which recently redeployed to Iraq is the first Army unit to deploy to a combat zone under the new organizational concept.

   The Army originally envisioned support troops as part of a self-contained “unit of action.” But if a forward-support company (FSC) is part of a combat unit, current DoD policy says that it cannot include women. Claiming that there are not enough male soldiers to fill its FSCs, the Army moved the FSCs from the maneuver battalions into the “gender”-integrated brigade support battalions (BSBs). Of course no matter where the FSCs appear on a table of organization, the fact is that in order to be effective, the soldiers of an FSC would have to live and work with the maneuver battalions all of the time.

   As Elaine Donnelly has pointed out, the Army has apparently rewritten the regulations regarding women in such a way as to make Bill Clinton’s infamous statement that “it depends on what the meaning of is, is,” appear to be straightforward. In her May 8 NRO piece describing a presentation by Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker at the American Enterprise Institute, she writes:

   Current directives exempt female soldiers from direct ground-combat units such as the infantry and armor, and from smaller support companies that “collocate” (operate 100 percent of the time) with land-combat troops. The new, unauthorized wording narrows the “collocation rule” to apply only when a combat unit is actually “conducting an assigned direct ground combat mission.” (Emphasis added.)

   General Schoomaker recited Defense Department regulations, but claimed (without justification) that the Army has separate rules that exempt female soldiers from collocation with land-combat battalions “at the time that those units are undergoing those operations” (emphasis added). By adding the words “conducting” or “undergoing” (a direct ground-combat mission) to the collocation rule, the Army has created a new regulation that has not been authorized by the secretary of defense, or reported to Congress in advance, as required by law.

   In other words, the Army says it is not in violation of DoD regulations because women in FSCs are not really “collocated” until the combat unit is engaged or about to be engaged in a direct combat mission. The breathtaking assumption here is that women in these units can be pulled out before the battle starts.

   General Schoomaker is a very experienced and able soldier. He certainly understands the role of “friction” and the “fog of uncertainty” in battle, having experienced these phenomena first hand. He must know that trying to pull women out of their units under such circumstances, even if it could be done at all in the chaos and confusion of combat, would be incredibly disruptive, undermining unit cohesion and effectiveness and diverting resources needed to prevail in the battle.

   Over the years, I have argued against the idea of placing American women in combat or in combat support or service support associated with direct ground combat. I base my position on the fact there are substantial physical differences between men and women that place the latter at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to ground combat. In addition, men treat women differently than they treat other men. This can undermine the comradeship upon which the unit cohesion necessary to success on the battlefield depends. The presence of women also leads to double standards that have a serious impact on morale and performance. In other words, men and women are not interchangeable. As I wrote in January, even the Israelis, who draft women into the IDF, do not place them in ground combat units.

   As persuasive as I believe my arguments are, the decision to place women in units that expose them to direct ground combat does not depend on my opinion. But it does not depend exclusively on the Army either. If the president and the secretary of defense believe the regulations should be changed to reflect the Army’s new approach, the latter needs to advise Congress, as current law requires. As Donnelly observes, this is a national-security matter, not a less important “women’s issue.” As such, Congress needs a say in this matter.

   — Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.

   I think that these rules are dangerous not only to the women involved, but to their coworkers and fellow soldiers.  You should take into consideration how men are raised to protect women, that women are our sisters, mothers, nieces and aunts, and that this is no place for women - you can’t convince me that it is, particularly when we’re facing a vicious enemy who targets women for the sheer pleasure of how it horrifies us to read about women beheaded, disembowelled, raped and so on.

   Althought he army has undertaken ’sensitivity training’ in order to make torture of a fellow female soldier something they won’t respond to.  Is that what we want-men who won’t protect our women?  That seems to be what the feminists want, but that’s not personally what I think of as heroic, or an extension of the principles that most people live by.

   In this new model, if you were in a bar with your wife and someone assaulted her, you’d stand there with your buddies and not lift a finger.

   Sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors and political correctness doesn’t take away the issues that we’re discussing here.

   Women can do what they want when it doesn’t effect other people.  When it effects our ability to win wars, when it effects unit cohesion, when it effects another soldier who might stop and help a woman because she can’t stand wearing her 25 pounds of body armor or carry her 75 pound rucksack plus the communications equipment, we have a problem.

   Comment by Cao — 5/24/2007 @ 5:05 pm

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