Religious Busybodies Complaining About Complaints About Religious Busybodies . . . (again)
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KTK
The right-wing hyena mob is working itself up again, this time over some long-overdue common sense that, predictably, offends their smug, religious sense of entitlement.
Apparently the National Cemetery Administration - the group that administers all the national public cemeteries - has a group of volunteer vets, affiliated with the VA, who attend funerals for military veterans and do some sort of flag-folding ceremony. At some point somebody wrote some kind of treacly religious pap about the “significance of the folds in the flag” (there isn’t any - they’re just folds), and the group has been reciting it at the funerals while they fold the flag. It’s filled with pseudo-symbolism (”the sixth fold is for where our hearts lie” - WTF?) and repeated religious references, explicitly Christian or Judeo-Christian. Nobody asked them to do this, and it isn’t a part of the planned services at people’s funerals - they just start doing it during the service without warning, and apparently most people let them get on with it because they’re, you know, sincere and all.
Finally, and obviously, someone complained that they didn’t want someone else’s religious maunderings injected into their family member’s funeral, and the NCA made the obvious decision that their staff - being government workers (volunteer or otherwise) - should not be in the business of doing so. So they issued the long-overdue directive that the flag folders should just fold the flag and keep their Vogon poetry to themselves. They made it explicitly clear that anyone who actually wanted to hear this thing at their family member’s funeral could have it, by requesting it ahead of time - the government is just not in the business of making unilateral religious declarations to a captive audience.
Naturally the wingers are beside themselves, blaming the person who complained (”one person prevents everyone in the country from hearing this heartwarming recitation”), complaining about “kicking God out of the public square”, and whatnot. Not one of the articles I’ve seen notes that the directive does not prevent a family from hearing anything they want at any point in the funeral. Naturally, not one even raises the question whether people acting on behalf of the government should unilaterally preach explicitly partisan religious credos without invitation at other families’ funeral. They’re just certain that some sort of high moral principle has been violated because a bunch of (literally) preachy vets don’t get to give their own religious speeches at other people’s memorial ceremonies without regard to the deceased’s actual wishes or beliefs. A California American Legion officer has apparently ordered that any AL members who volunteer for these funerals are to ignore the regulations and read the thing anyway, without asking permission. Because it’s their feelings that count . . .
