The silencing of VA chaplains in Massachusetts recieved no national media attention — and surprisingly, little has been heard from the defenders of free expression. In my story at Good Faith Media, I highlight a big exception. Here are a few excerpts from the story.
Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at a veterans hospital in Minneapolis, was killed by officers of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol last month. He is being memorialized nationwide, but chaplains at Veterans Affairs facilities in Massachusetts have been barred from mentioning his name.
Chaplains of all faiths were told “not to mention VA nurses at all, let alone the name Alex Pretti, at worship or gatherings,” according to The Republican newspaper of Springfield, Massachusetts. Emails containing this directive were sent to chaplains at the end of January by the state office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The emails also instructed clergy not to offer counseling or support to VA nurses.
“It is inhuman, unconscionable, and unconstitutional to silence VA chaplains,” Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), said in an interview. “This is propelling the Constitution into a woodchipper.”
...the Massachusetts VA policy appears to have been implemented at the Edward P. Boland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton. Several chaplains at the facility spoke anonymously with veteran reporter Jim Kinney out of fear of reprisals.
One “feared losing the ability to minister at all at the VA.” Another said they were “ordered to cease and desist in offering Pretti-related support and counsel to VA nurses. The chaplain was told he can only offer Mass.”
A clergyperson said a supervisor claimed that Pretti’s death was political, and so chaplains were given copies of the Hatch Act, which outlaws partisan activity by government employees. VA chaplains are government employees.
Weinstein served for seven years as a military lawyer in the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps and later as a lawyer in the Reagan White House. He said this invocation of the Hatch Act was an egregious abuse and a willful misinterpretation of the law.
“When you intentionally intimidate chaplains as to what they can and cannot counsel and pray about for fear of violation of the Hatch Act, it’s just bullshit,” Weinstein said. “Restricting the First Amendment rights of VA chaplains is what you would expect from a full-throttle fascist regime,” he said.
The anonymous chaplains told The Republican they believed the directive was coming from “on high” in Washington. Weinstein agreed that it was probably so.
The censoring of VA staff and chaplains may seem surprising, given that [Veterans Administration] Secretary Collins is a chaplain and a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. But Weinstein was not surprised.
“The primary animating jet fuel of the rise in religious abuses in the armed forces and the VA,” Weinstein said, “is Christian nationalism.”
“Service members and VA personnel call me up every day, desperate for help,” he said, and they wonder what they can do. “Action is the antidote to despair,” he tells them, quoting folk singer Joan Baez.“I hope that people will take action,” Weinstein concluded, “because silence is collaboration. We must prioritize chronicling and exposing this tyranny as a powerful way to resist this unconstitutional darkness.
Get the whole story here. Promote it on Blue Sky here.
