Air Force Academy grad: school 'very, very ill'

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Air Force Academy grad: school 'very, very ill'

Rocky Mountain News, October 10, 2005

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) - When Mikey Weinstein was 2 years old, according to family lore, his parents received a knock on the door. It was the neighbors, upset that the boy had bitten their dog.

"I guess I've always been very resolute," Weinstein said.

These days, the 50-year-old New Mexico lawyer who spent three years working in the Reagan White House is biting into a project that - to hear him describe it - absolutely turns his stomach.

The Jewish father of two Air Force Academy cadets sued the Air Force in U.S. District Court last week, claiming senior officers and cadets illegally imposed evangelical Christianity on others at the school.

"I love the Air Force Academy more than anything but my own family," said Weinstein, a 1977 academy honor graduate who lives in Albuquerque. "But the academy is very, very ill right now."

An Air Force spokesman in Washington, Lt. Col. Frank Smolinsky, declined to discuss specifics of the lawsuit Thursday. He said the Air Force "is committed to defending the rights of all our men and women, whatever their beliefs."

Over the past 20 months, Weinstein said he has become convinced academy leaders are nurturing a culture where evangelical Christians - officers, cadets, chaplains, coaches and professors - are bullying members of other faiths.

Weinstein grows fiery when he discusses the dispute.

Words and concepts rattle off his lips during a two-hour interview. He quotes Martin Luther King, Dwight Eisenhower and T.S. Eliot, and coolly vows to pressure the Air Force until reforms occur.

"I don't get steamed real easy," he said. "I can do this for the long run."

The issue arose early in 2004, Weinstein said, with complaints by non-evangelical Christian cadets who said academy commanders encouraged them to see Mel Gibson's controversial film, "The Passion of the Christ."

"There were thousands of posters all over the academy, urging the cadets to go see the movie," Weinstein explained.

Within months, Weinstein said his sons reported a rise in anti-Semitic slurs. A Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another Jew was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.

But the proselytizing was not directed exclusively at Jews. Weinstein said he has heard from "hundreds and hundreds" of cadets and academy staffers of various faiths who complained that evangelical Christians tried to convert them.

"Many of them won't speak out publicly because they fear their commanders will be able to triangulate the complaints and identify them," Weinstein said.

In many cases, Weinstein felt the incidents implied an official Air Force position on religion - and that's what concerns him.

"My problem is not with Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity or even evangelical Christianity," he said. "It's that whenever a religion - in this case a group of people - tries to engage the machinery of the state, it is constitutionally repugnant and violative."

For example, Weinstein said Commandant of Cadets Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida sent an e-mail to promote the National Day of Prayer, urging cadets to "ask the Lord to give us the wisdom to discover the right, the courage to choose it and the strength to make it endure."

On Friday, Weida was reassigned to a leadership position at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. He was cleared of seven allegations of proselytizing, including his June 2003 "guidance" to cadets that said they are "accountable first to your God."

An Air Force spokeswoman characterized Weida's reassignment as routine.

Weinstein also described a training session for new cadets last year - witnessed by a visiting group from Yale Divinity School - where academy chaplain Maj. Warren Watties exhorted cadets to convert classmates to evangelical Christianity.

It's not only Weinstein speaking out. Former academy chaplain Melinda Morton shares many of his concerns - enough that she turned in her Air Force commission this summer.

"I resigned over this issue. Do I think this matter is of some importance? Yes, I do," said Morton, an ordained Lutheran minister who earlier in her 13-year Air Force career was a Minuteman missile launch officer.

Morton believes top-ranking academy officers like Weida and Superintendent Lt. Gen. John Rosa "really had no intention of dealing seriously with these problems." She said she expressed concerns but was ignored.

"Engaging in religious bigotry on a wholesale scale is not helpful to the Air Force," Morton said. "So there must be something else in the balance that they feel is worth clutching."

Morton and Weinstein both became angered by a quote on the front page of the July 12 New York Times attributed to Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson, deputy chief of chaplains for the entire Air Force.

"We will not proselytize, but we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched," Richardson was quoted as saying.

Weinstein sued the Air Force, alleging religious intolerance, last week in federal court in Albuquerque after he said Air Force officials refused to repudiate Richardson's comment.

"The Air Force is not a mission field," Morton said. "It is inappropriate in the extreme for anyone in the Air Force to feel they are in an environment where someone is trying to convert them."

The dispute has made Weinstein into "a reluctant leader," he said.

Working from his home in the Sandia Mountain foothills, Weinstein hired a Washington, D.C., public relations firm to help his cause.

He seems focused, too, whether it's fighting against what he claims is religious intolerance or logging his six-mile workouts on an elliptical machine - which Weinstein says he's done every day since May 22, 1999.

"A lot of people get upset by Mikey's passion," Morton said. "To me, he's like Jiminy Cricket. He's that annoying little voice you can't ignore. The Air Force should listen to him. He's telling them the right way to go."

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