Rev. Franklin Graham says that atheist groups are attempting to “bully Christian into silence” after the Christian-targeting Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) demanded an Air Force general be courtmartialed for giving credit to God on the National Day of Prayer.
“Are Christians the only group of people who cannot identify themselves publicly in this country? Are we the only voices who cannot speak?” Graham asked in a Facebook post on Monday.
“I guess this group would’ve tried to court martial George Washington when he prayed at Valley Forge! Come on —whose civil liberties are really being infringed on here? They want to bully Christians into silence.”
The MRFF said that Maj. Gen. Craig Olson should be “aggressively and very visibly brought to justice for his unforgivable crimes and transgressions” after crediting God for his success during a speech at the National Day of Prayer Task Force event May 7th.
“He put me in charge of failing programs worth billions of dollars. I have no ability to do that, no training to do that. God did that. He sent me to Iraq to negotiate foreign military sales deals through an Arabic interpreter. I have no ability to do that. I was not trained to do that. God did all of that,” Olson said.
The head of the MRFF said that airmen are not allowed to endorse a faith.
“Olson’s highly publicized, sectarian speech is nothing less than a brutal disgrace to the very uniform he was wearing and the solemn oath he took to support and defend the United States Constitution,” Mikey Weinstein wrote.
“This public address was his, and the USAF’s, ‘contribution’ to this scathingly sectarian 2015 version of the [task force’s] annual shame spectacle and display of Christian supremacy and exceptionalism held in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill.
Graham said that Weinstein’s actions show “in America, there has recently grown an ugly, anti-Christian bias and intolerance that is changing our nation from the inside out, opening doors for all kinds of discrimination and loss of religious freedom that we hear about daily in the news.”