by Christopher Sanchez
Daily Lobo
Eight hours after he filed a suit against the U.S. Air Force, Mikey Weinstein, an Albuquerque resident, spoke to UNM students and faculty members Thursday evening at the School of Law.
Weinstein, a 1977 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and an attorney for the Reagan administration, said his son who graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and his son who is a junior at the Academy now have been discriminated against by the Academy because they are Jewish.
"My kids were constantly accused of being utterly complicit in the execution of Jesus Christ," Weinstein said. "My kids were told that all of their forebears were burning eternally in hell and any children they would have would burn eternally in hell."
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He said the final straw was when a senior Air Force official made a statement in the New York Times, saying the "U.S. Air Force reserves its right to evangelize anyone who they determine to be unchurched."
Brooke Nowak-Neely, co-president of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter at UNM Law School, said the lecture was enlightening.
"I learned the problem is a little more pervasive than I thought it was," Nowak-Neely said.
She is an advocate of the separation of church and state, she said.
"As a law student, more and more I understand the fundamental legal principals that our country was based on," Nowak-Neely said. "It wasn't based on faith. It wasn't based on any of that. It was based on getting away from oppression of an oppressive government, and that's what our country was founded upon."
Weinstein said an hour before the lecture at UNM, he received a letter from the Air Force General Council stating the policy that allows the Academy to evangelize anyone had been removed a couple of months prior to the suit.
"It's amazing it happens on the day we filed suit," he said.
He said the Constitution guarantees Congress shall make no law to prohibit the exercise of religious freedom, and evangelical fundamentalist Christians have broken that law.
"Most of America used to live in the happy land between the no establishment clause and free exercise clause," Weinstein said. "But at the Air Force Academy and the U.S. Air Force, and I think much of our military, that happy land has become brutalized, assaulted, tortured and bludgeoned into a poisoned no man's land."
He said non-Christians at the Academy have been discriminated against in more ways than one.
"If you didn't go to a Protestant or Catholic worship service, you were marched in a heathen flight to stand at attention - sometimes in your tent or in your room," Weinstein said. "You couldn't speak. You couldn't say anything."
He said everyone who is not an evangelical Christian is facing a challenge in the U.S. military.
"This is not a Christian-Jewish thing," Weinstein said. "It's an evangelical Christian versus the Constitution and everybody else."
There was never bias against his religion when he was in the Academy, Weinstein said. He said the problem started in the early 1980s when evangelical Christians flocked to Colorado Springs.
"They started coming like moths to a light in Colorado Springs in the early 1980s, in which of course, they have the perfect right to do." Weinstein said. "And apparently, that's when the problems started happening at the Academy."
He filed suit to force the Air Force to adopt a policy to never impose their religious views upon each other while on duty. He said the U.S. Air Force should be forced to adopt a position of neutrality.
He is sure the suit will win, he said.
"We're going to win, and we're already winning," Weinstein said. "We've granulated the process for their advancement, as opposed to lubricated."
