William Boykin

I opened up my Washington Post yesterday morning – yes, I still read a paper edition – only to see a full-page ad on page A7 headlined, “DECLARATION OF DEPENDENCE UPON GOD AND HIS HOLY BIBLE.”

“Oh, this ought to be good,” I thought.

Indeed, the ad didn’t disappoint. It stated that people have certain rights given to them by the Creator and among them “is the right to exercise our Christian beliefs as put forth in God’s Holy Bible.”

Military leaders are so disgusted with President Barack Obama that they’d like to launch a coup d’état to get rid of him, but that pesky U.S. Constitution keeps getting in the way, says a retired Army general who now works for the Family Research Council.

So, have you heard the one about how the military is preparing to court-martial anyone who dares to say “God bless you” if someone sneezes?

OK, I’m being facetious. The stories being told about the Armed Forces by the Religious Right aren’t that strange – yet. But they are getting there.

Back in 2003, a general in the U.S. Army named William G. “Jerry” Boykin got himself in hot water because he had a habit of appearing, often in full uniform, before meetings of right-wing evangelicals and making intemperate comments about Islam.

During one appearance in Oregon, Boykin opined that Islamic extremists hate the United States “because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundations and our roots are Judeo-Christian.”

At a time when the Religious Right wants to put church and state together like peanut butter and jelly, there is a growing movement for church-state separation in a Catholic-dominated Eastern European country.

As I mentioned on Friday, I spent the weekend attending the “Values Voter Summit,” the annual Religious Right uber-conference sponsored by the Family Research Council and its allies. This was the sixth time I’ve been to this event, and I wasn’t the only one there from Americans United. (Barry Lynn and three other staffers were there as well.)

Longtime readers of “The Wall of Separation” might remember William “Jerry” Boykin, an Army general who in 2003 sparked controversy for giving speeches to fundamentalist Christian audiences during which he asserted, among other things, that Muslims worship idols and that the real enemy of America is not Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein but Satan.