HASC Struggles For Compromise On Evangelicals, Atheists: NDAA 2014

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http://breakingdefense.com/2013/06/06/hasc-struggles-for-compromise-on-evangelicals-atheists-ndaa-2014/

HASC Struggles For Compromise On Evangelicals, Atheists: NDAA 2014
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. and Colin Clark on June 06, 2013 at 1:33 PM

CAPITOL HILL: Lobbyists and journalists focus on the big numbers in the defense budget when they look at the annual National Defense Authorization Act. But in the political theater that is the House Armed Services Committee’s markup of the NDAA, sometimes it’s the small dramas that are most telling. So it was yesterday evening, when an amendment proposed by Louisiana Republican John Fleming put his fellow Republicans right between the Rock of Ages and a political hard place.

A bipartisan majority had already slapped down an amendment offered by New Jersey Democrat Rob Andrews that would allow the appointment of atheists as chaplains. (It’s not quite such an oxymoron as it sounds: more on that below). But then Fleming, a Mississippi-born medical doctor elected to Congress in 2008, introduced his own amendment that threatened to undo a compromise worked out by GOP leaders last year in the fiscal 2013 NDAA.

The law currently on the books (Public Law 112, Section 533) states that “the Armed Forces shall accommodate the beliefs” of servicemembers and not discriminate against them except for “actions and speech that threaten good order and discipline.” A major purpose of the law was to protect conservative and evangelical Christians, especially chaplains, from official retribution for statements that might offend other groups, such as denouncing homosexual marriage as contrary to the Bible, urging non-Christians to convert, or simply ending a public prayer with “in Jesus’s name, amen.”

But Fleming argue that protection still isn’t enough, that “accomodat(ing) beliefs” had been interpreted so broadly by some commanders that they had punished conservative Christian servicemembers for statements potentially offensive to secularists and gays. He wanted to amend Section 533 to “the Armed Forces shall accommodate the beliefs, actions, and speech” of servicemembers except for “actions and speech that actually harm good order and discipline.”