{"id":120,"date":"2010-11-25T11:30:54","date_gmt":"2010-11-25T11:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/navy-v-quakers.html"},"modified":"2010-11-25T11:30:54","modified_gmt":"2010-11-25T11:30:54","slug":"navy-v-quakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/navy-v-quakers.html","title":{"rendered":"Navy v. Quakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Quakers.jpg\"The
\nPuritans had many good qualities, but a commitment to religious
\ntolerance was not exactly their forte. Particularly obnoxious to them
\nwere the Quakers, whose understanding of an “inner light” in all people
\nran seriously afoul of Calvinist ideas of original sin. Quakers were
\ntherefore banned from all the New England colonies except Rhode Island,
\nand in Massachusetts, several were put to death for refusing to remove
\nthemselves from that holy commonwealth.<\/p>\n

So on the day when we
\ncommemorate Puritan Gratitude it is appropriate to note that  the U.S.
\nNavy is currently honoring this local tradition by persecuting a Quaker
\nin these parts. The Quaker in question is Michael Izbicki, an officer in
\nthe submarine corps in New London, who since graduating from the Naval
\nAcademy has come to the conclusion that he cannot support war, applied
\nfor conscientious objector status, and joined the Quaker meeting in
\nWesterly, RI. <\/p>\n

In his application for CO status, Izbicki has received the support of
\nvarious clergy, including a tough-minded Navy chaplain who normally
\ntakes a dim view of sailors wishing to get out of the service after
\nreceiving a free education at Annapolis. But the two Inspecting Officers
\ncharged with assessing Izbicki’s case turned thumbs down. The first did
\nso by finding that Izbicki did not measure up to the standards of a
\nCatholic catechism. The second found that Izbicki failed to meet his
\nevangelical terms of faith–biblical inerrancy, Rick Warren’s
\njustification for war, etc.–and suggested that he considered the
\nSociety of Friends a cult comparable to the Heaven’s Gate<\/a> suicides of a decade ago. <\/p>\n

The ACLU of Connecticut has taken on Izbicki’s case, filing a habeas corpus petition<\/a>
\nagainst the Navy in U.S. District Court in Hartford. In all
\nprobability, the Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers will quickly
\nrecognize that the Naval authorities have behaved in grotesque violation
\nof longstanding rules for evaluating conscientious objector
\napplications. I suppose it’s understandable that after nearly four
\ndecades of an all-volunteer military, memories of how to deal with COs
\nhave faded in the services. But Izbicki’s case shows that a little
\neducation is in order. Just because the Puritans didn’t like it doesn’t
\nmean that Michael Izbicki’s inner light isn’t to be respected.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Puritans had many good qualities, but a commitment to religious tolerance was not exactly their forte. Particularly obnoxious to them were the Quakers, whose understanding of an “inner light” in all people ran seriously afoul of Calvinist ideas of original sin. Quakers were therefore banned from all the New England colonies except Rhode Island,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nNavy v. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}