Blog from the Capital

It's nice to see someone of authority offer a lucid and thoughtful defense of the military prayer guildelines as they presently stand, and against the amendment the House just passed as part of the Defense authorization bill. In today's Washington Post story (I posted links to other stories about this earlier this week and again today), the chief of Navy chaplains, Louis V. Iasiello, offers just the kind of understanding Rep. Walter Jones claims to be missing.

"We felt there needed to be a clarification" of the rules "because there is political correctness creeping into the chaplains corps," said Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.). "I don't understand anyone being opposed to a chaplain having the freedom to pray to God in the way his conscience calls him to pray."

Among the provision's opponents is the chief of Navy chaplains, Rear Adm. Louis V. Iasiello, a Roman Catholic priest.

"The language ignores and negates the primary duties of the chaplain to support the religious needs of the entire crew" and "will, in the end, marginalize chaplains and degrade their use and effectiveness," Iasiello wrote in a letter to a committee member.

The National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces, a private association of religious groups that provide more than 70 percent of U.S. chaplains, also objected to the language. "Chaplains represent their faith communities and we endorse them to represent that faith community with integrity and loyalty to that tradition, not to the dictates of their individual conscience," the association's executive committee wrote.

I don't know about you, but I tend to support the bulk of military chaplains in determining the role of military chaplains, especially in their efforts to be *more inclusive*, over a congressman who would ridicule that effort as "politically correct". There are times when "politically correct" also has the benefit of being just plain correct.