I’d like to quickly pull together a couple stories that I’ve been seeing floating around the internets of late, as it seems to me that they must be connected, but no one seems to have made the connection just yet.
Nearly four weeks ago, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation lost one of its own, Navy SEAL Glen Doherty, in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Chris Rodda briefly eulogized him and Mikey Weinstein also released an epitaph in his honor. Both of them praised Doherty for his unflagging work maintaining the separation of church and state. Glen fought against creeping theocracy at home, and he died fighting militant Salafi Jihadists who passionately hate secularism and freedom of conscience. (I’m not trying to suggest that Christian Supremacists are comparable in every way to their Islamic counterparts, but I’m not nearly the first to note the similarities.)
Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned earlier today that Mitt Romney has been using Glen’s story in his stump speeches. Evidently, he has been asked to stop doing so by Glen’s mother, who didn’t want her son’s death to be co-opted by Romney’s political agenda, for reasons she left somewhat unspecified.
As in the case of Pat Tillman, once again political aspirants are seizing upon the death of an American hero without any regard for whether that man would have supported their policies or endorsed their candidacy. Romney and his party should stop trying to tear down the wall of separation of church and state, and failing that, they should at least stop pretending that every fallen hero supported their agenda.
