JABbering Stooge

In case you’re wondering, the post title refers to the sci-fi TV series Babylon 5, particularly the middle of Season 3 through the end of season 4, when the Earth Alliance Civil War is in full swing. And the Captain Sheridan of the hour is one Michael "Mikey" Weinstein. Weinstein is an alumnus of the Air Force Academy who spent 10 years as a JAG officer before serving on St. Ronnie "Red Ink" Raygun’s Iran-Contra legal defense team (I suspect that he didn’t really enjoy that, but didn’t have much choice).

Weinstein’s latest work was in bringing the Air Force Academy proselytizing scandal to light, and has played a prominent role in the fight for the religious freedom of cadets ever since. In the latest battle on that front, he has formed a 501(c)(3) organization called the "Military Religious Freedom Foundation", and has a book in the works entitled With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military. For his efforts, he has been called "the Field General of the Godless Armies of Satan" and subjected to repeated death threats. (What is it about right wingers and death threats against anyone who dares hold a differing opinion?)

Favorite Weinstein quotes:

Let me make it clear. I would shed my last drop of blood to defend their right to hold that biblical worldview. They are absolutely entitled to believe that Anne Frank is burning in hell along with Dr. Seuss, Gandhi and Einstein. But I will not accept my government telling me who are the children of the greater God and who are the children of the lesser God. That’s the difference. I will not defend — I will fight them tooth and nail, and lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds — if they engage the machinery of the state, which is what they’re doing.

Michael Weinstein, at a speech announcing the formation of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation

They say the bad guys we’re fighting, the jihadists, represent a theocratic, fascistic movement. If the United States Air Force, probably the most technologically lethal organization ever assembled by man, has a policy of evangelizing ‘the unchurched,’ you tell me how that makes us look.

Michael Weinstein, on the hypocrisy of AFA policies during the War on Terrorism

I am thunderstruck that a branch of government would collaborate with fundamentalist Christians to convert members of the armed forces to evangelical Christianity.

Michael Weinstein, on the deliberate inaction by The Most Holy George W. Christ’s rubber-stamp Congress in dealing with the AFA’s bias against non-Christians

I love the Air Force Academy more than anything but my own family, … But the academy is very, very ill right now.

Michael Weinstein, on the Jihad Squad’s hostile takeover of the AFA