What if someone told you that military training should be 94 percent religious worship and 6 percent physical fitness? That’s the idea that U.S. Representative Zach Wamp is promoting with his latest earmark, a whopper at more than 15 million dollars for construction of a new facility at the Army’s Fort Campbell.
Congressman Wamp is fond of saying that his proposed new facility will be a combined worship chapel and physical fitness center, but that kind of description doesn’t reflect the nature of facility Wamp and his supporters have designed. Wamp’s earmark provides fourteen million dollars for the religious worship facilities at the “chapel complex”. Only nine hundred thousand is allocated for the physical fitness center.
Think about the expensive equipment that’s required for a physical fitness center, as opposed to the relatively simple requirements for a chapel, and the funding becomes even more baffling. Wamp says that the chapel complex is designed for soldiers and their families as a “facility in which to worship and practice their religious faith”. What do people really need to worship and practice religious faith, though, other than a comfortable, dry place (and sometimes not even that)?
Looking at this earmark, you’ve got to wonder if Zach Wamp regards the military as a means of national defense, or a tool for religious conversion. If Wamp were allowed to design the entire U.S. military, you’d have a force of flabby, out of shape soldiers who could recite any Bible verse by heart.
Supporters of this project from around the Fort Campbell area, such as Deanna McLaughlin, member of the Clarksville City Council, smell a lot of money coming their way. So, they’re coming up with some ingenious arguments about why the U.S. government should pay for the construction of a 14 million dollar church. She says that current conditions are intolerable. “If somebody needs spiritual counseling, they have to drive to individual chapels looking for somebody,” she complains.
So, you mean that, if someone wants to find a church where they can engage in religious worship, they have to go to different churches before they find one that’s right for them? How is that a problem? It sounds pretty normal to me.
McLaughlin, Wamp and her ilk might want to consider a little old piece of legislation called the First Amendment. It’s in the Bill of Rights. That’s in the Constitution. The first clause of the First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
Legislation passed by Congress ordering the federal government to pay for the construction of a 14 million dollar church complex certainly qualifies as “an establishment of religion”. That means that the Wamp earmark is not only grotesquely wasteful and out of balance, but unconstitutional as well.
If soldiers at Fort Campbell want to engage in religious worship, that’s their private business. They can go to a church in one of the communities near the military base if they want to. Nobody, whether in Clarksville or in Fort Campbell, has the right to demand that the American people spend 14 million dollars just to make a new big government church.
On another note, think how screwed up soldiers will become when Jesus himself preached against killing and Wamp’s there telling ‘em it’s the thing to do. Reminds me of the ol’ “kill a commie for Christ” bullshit we used to see during the Nam era. These poor psychologically broken humans
come home from the horror of war and there’s no place to find respite with Wamp’s plan, since it’s at odds with the true teachings of most religions. It seems mixing religion with war just makes it worse.