{"id":175,"date":"2011-02-23T10:13:29","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T10:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/navy-decides-to-recognize-cos-conscience.html"},"modified":"2011-02-23T10:13:29","modified_gmt":"2011-02-23T10:13:29","slug":"navy-decides-to-recognize-cos-conscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/navy-decides-to-recognize-cos-conscience.html","title":{"rendered":"Navy decides to recognize C.O.’s conscience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Izbicki.jpg\"Back around Thanksgiving, we brought you<\/a>
\nthe story of Michael Izbicki, the ensign and Annapolis grad who had
\nsued the Navy in federal court for turning down his application to be
\ndischarged because his Christian faith had led him become a
\nconscientious objector. The good news is that after two years the Navy
\nhas seen the error of its ways and granted Izbicki his honorable
\ndischarge. He got the news a month ago, but now the ink is on the paper
\nand he can leave New London and return to his family in California in
\npeace.<\/p>\n

Paul Vitello does a fine job telling the tale<\/a> in today’s New York Times<\/i>,
\nbut there remain a couple of lessons worth pointing up. First, it’s
\nclear that the Navy and most likely the other services need some
\neducation in how to handle C.O. cases, and specifically in how to reckon
\nwith the varieties of religious experience that can lead personnel in
\nthat direction. Despite having his petition supported by chaplains
\ninside and outside the military, the officers who received his petition
\nand the investigators who questioned him had never dealt with a C.O.
\ncase before, and somehow believed that their job was to judge Izbicki
\naccording to their own personal religious lights.<\/p>\n

Second, we should bear in mind that however the military personnel on
\nthe ground handle the preliminaries, it’s the lawyers in the Pentagon
\nwho make the decisions once the case gets to court. As Vitello points
\nout, back in 2007, a West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran won a
\ndischarge only after a long court battle. I have reason to believe that
\nIzbicki was spared that ordeal because Obama administration lawyers are
\nnow the deciders. Next time religious conservatives begin complaining
\nabout lack of respect for religious conscience under Obama, they should
\nbe reminded of Michael Izbicki.   <\/p>\n

Izbicki is the kind of straight arrow who from the
\noutset said he wanted to reimburse the government for the cost of his
\nNaval Academy education–as in fact he will be doing. Raised as a
\nnon-denominational evangelical, his reading of the Bible and other
\nreligious literature led him to become a pacifist and a Quaker, and he
\nsupposed that his military superiors would respect him for coming forward with his views.\n<\/p>\n

“The nuclear program in the Navy stresses integrity and honesty,” he told me yesterday.
\n“And when I showed the Navy what I believed and why…I
\nthought it would be a straightforward process. It was not nearly as
\nstraightforward as I thought it would be.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back around Thanksgiving, we brought you the story of Michael Izbicki, the ensign and Annapolis grad who had sued the Navy in federal court for turning down his application to be discharged because his Christian faith had led him become a conscientious objector. The good news is that after two years the Navy has seen…<\/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-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nNavy decides to recognize C.O.'s conscience - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/navy-decides-to-recognize-cos-conscience.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Navy decides to recognize C.O.'s conscience - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Back around Thanksgiving, we brought you the story of Michael Izbicki, the ensign and Annapolis grad who had sued the Navy in federal court for turning down his application to be discharged because his Christian faith had led him become a conscientious objector. 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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\/175","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=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}