Background
The organization was founded by Michael Weinstein in 2005 for the purpose of opposing the spread of alleged religious intimidation by evangelical Christians in positions of power within the US military. Weinstein experienced discrimination due to his Jewish faith while a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy. After his sons experienced discrimination as well while at the Academy, Weinstein founded the MRFF in 2005.
Weinstein describes the group's target as "a small subset of evangelical Christianity that's called premilliennial, dispensational, reconstructionist, dominionist, fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity or just Dominionist Christianity." The group is asking the United States Congress to hold oversight hearings regarding what it alleges is the Defense Department's failure to abide by the Constitutionally mandated separation of Church and State.
From its inception, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has advocated for and assisted thousands of active duty U.S. servicemen/women and veterans who have contacted the MRFF regarding alleged religious discrimination, harassment and aggressive proselytizing by Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christians. The MRFF reports that more than 90% of the servicemen/women and veterans who contact the MRFF with complaints are Christians.
On September 11, 2012, advisory board member Glen Doherty died in the U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya. MRFF founder Michael L. Weinstein said that Doherty had "helped me on many MRFF client cases behind the scenes to facilitate assistance to armed forces members abused horribly by fundamentalist Christian proselytizing."
Read more about this topic: Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)