Evangelical Christians and legal experts applaud a federal judge for tossing out a lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force Academy last week -- one which had accused the academy of creating an atmosphere which fostered religious discrimination.
U.S. District Judge James A. Parker in New Mexico ruled that Albuquerque-based lawyer Mikey Weinstein and the handful of other former cadets who brought the legal action had provided no proof to their "vague" allegations that the academy was biased in favor of evangelical Christians and improperly allowed Christian cadets to proselytize those of other faiths.
Alliance Defense Fund attorney Kevin Theriot said the judge wisely ruled that since the former cadets who filed the suit were no longer at the academy, the legal action served no purpose.
"He dismissed a completely baseless suit," Theriot told CitizenLink. "The plaintiffs were trying to get the court to prohibit, not only people at the academy, but anyone in the Air Force from sharing their faith with their fellow servicemen while they were on duty. And that would have been an incredibly intrusive restriction on religious speech and the ability of people of faith -- any faith -- to share their faith."
Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said a different decision could have been disastrous.
“If the judge would have gone the opposite direction, then that would have been the first time in American history that we would have had to develop a protocol in the government to establish religion,” Haggard told Family News in Focus.
The U.S. Air Force also applauded Parker’s ruling.
"We believe academy officials performed properly and that this litigation is one important step in the direction in judicial recognition of that," Major Gen. Jack Rives, the top judicial officer of the Air Force, said.
Weinstein, the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has vowed to re-file the lawsuit.
"Our fight is far from over," he said in a news release. "Religious bias and the outrageous violations of the separation of church and state continue to spread rampantly throughout our military."
But in an interview with Family News in Focus, Weinstein adopted a much more militant tone.
"Basically we’re going to use the guidance given by the judge in this dismissal action as coordinates to guide our dagger to the heart of dominionist, Christian, Evangelical unconstitutional activity in the military," Weinstein said. "We will stab at that heart over and over again until we bring dominionist Christians back into compliance with our wonderful U.S. Constitution."
The lawsuit stems from allegations which surfaced in 2005 during the course of a rape and sexual-abuse scandal at the academy, in which Weinstein and other graduates claimed that evangelical officers and cadets routinely imposed their religion on others at the academy.
Cadets were supposedly coerced into prayers at mandatory academy events and pressured to engage in evangelical religious practices, such as Bible study.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State Director Barry Lynn demanded an investigation into what he called "these very serious, systematic violations of the Constitution."
But an Air Force panel looking into the charges concluded no overt religious discrimination existed at the academy -- even though some individual cadets and staff may have been insensitive in the way they discussed religious beliefs.
Steve Adams, associate editor of Citizen magazine, also examined the original allegations and the controversy surrounding the incident in a November 2005 story called "Architecture of a Smear."
"The more we looked into it, the more contrived we found the charges to be," Adams told CitizenLink. "While the academy has been portrayed as some kind of evangelical Christian bastion, cadets told me that there were far more pressures for partying and against Christian values."
He said many of the allegations took incidents completely out of context.
"For example, one charge made against Air Force Falcon football coach Fisher DeBerry accused him of crossing the line because of a banner in the team locker room which said, 'I play for Team Jesus,' " Adams said.
"What they didn't report, was that this wasn't Fisher DeBerry's banner, it was the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' Competitor's Creed. It was a quote."
Adams said the Air Force investigation not only failed to turn up evidence supporting Lynn's and Weinstein's allegations of widespread abuse, it found very few actual complaints.
"In fact, it turned up much to the contrary," he said, "including some visiting Naval Academy students who said they missed the more spiritually nurturing atmosphere at their academy, where noon-time prayers have been a tradition for 150 years."
Adams said Parker is to be commended for seeing the case for what it is --"vague allegations lacking specificity and substance."
