It's Sunday

On Veterans Day in 2012, about six weeks into his deployment in Afghanistan, [U.S. Army Reserve chaplain Chris] Antal, who is a Unitarian Universalist minister, delivered a fiery sermon at Kandahar Airfield.

“Most Merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you,” he declared. “We have made war entertainment enjoying box seats in the carnival of death consuming violence, turning tragedy into games raising our children to kill without remorse.”

“We have morally disengaged, outsourcing our killing to the 1 percent, forgetting they follow our orders the blood they shed is on our hands too,” Antal said in the sermon, titled “A Veteran’s Day Confession for America.”

“We have sanitized killing and condoned extrajudicial assassinations: death by remote control, war made easy without due process, protecting ourselves from the human cost of war,” he continued, in heated condemnation of the drone program..

[...]

Two days after posting the sermon on [a church] website, Antal was contacted by an Army lawyer who had read the post. He was summoned to his commander’s office, who “told me that my message doesn’t support the mission,” Antal recalled. “He told me that I make us look like the bad guys.”

Antal’s commander asked him to take the post down. He did so, yet subsequently faced a two-month investigation that ended with an official reprimand.

[...]

After the reprimand, in mid-April, Antal decided to voluntarily resign from the U.S. military in an act of protest.

[...]

Antal wrote an open letter to President Obama in April announcing his resignation. In the letter [...] he excoriated the Executive Branch for giving itself “the right to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, for secret reasons, based on secret evidence, in a secret process, undertaken by unidentified officials.”

He also blasted the Executive Branch for continuing “to invest billions of dollars into nuclear weapons, which threaten the existence of humankind and the earth.”

“I resign because I refuse to support U.S. policy of preventive war, permanent military supremacy and global power projection,” Antal wrote, accusing the Executive Branch of expecting “extra-constitutional authority and impunity from international law.”

“I refuse to support this policy of imperial overstretch,” the U.S. Army minister concluded. “I resign because I refuse to serve as an empire chaplain.”

[...]

By resigning, Antal is sacrificing any benefits that he earned through his eight years of service in the military.

[...]

Rev. Antal has not yet received a response to his letter to President Obama.

  Salon

Don't hold your breath.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.