Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom by Steven Waldman, 2019; 321 pgs. This book intrigued me for several reasons. As a 17 year old who became a Mormon I was very familiar with the anti-Mormon activities of various Protestant / Evangelical faiths in the early history of my church – Missouri Governor Boggs extermination order of 1847 wasn’t rescinded until about 1979, and the murder of Joseph Smith by a mob of various religious sects and law enforcement. But I was also very personally familiar with it as well. One Sunday in the fall of 1968 I was walking across the football practice field at Northside High school in Warner Robins, GA. Danny Carpenter and a few other of my fellow players from the football team were playing off season touch football. Upon spying me they ran up and surrounded me demanding to know where I was going. “To church. You want to go with me?” I said. Danny Carpenter, the best and most popular player on the team, took out a revolver and shot me in the right side of my face.
It was a starter pistol – luckily. But I still received powder burns to the side of my face. I don’t remember anything immediately afterward except that I was in church that day. I never mentioned it to anyone. In fact I totally blocked it out of my mind for fifty years. I returned to my high school occasionally on leave from the Marines when Danny was the head football coach (he later became School Superintendent as did his younger brother David – no nepotism in that small Goergia town). I even attended my 30 year class reunion. Each time I couldn’t understand Danny’s discomfort at my visits. It was a scene in a NetFlix movie fifty years later that jolted the memory of Danny Carpenter shooting me in the face. Everything became clearer. I understood all his and others discomfort. I called my foster sister Katherine and told her. Her parents took me in and have known me since 1967 and I had never told them.
When I took over a Special Forces operational detachment (ODA 724, B/1/7) I was subjected to the most crass form of religious bigotry by the company commander Major Lenaghan and the company command sergeant major Lucero because I neither drank nor whored around. Lucero would tape the most pornographic pictures on the table around the sign-in sheet in the chow hall during a deployment to Camp Blanding, Florida. He and others would watch and laugh as I signed in – disappointed at not getting a visible reaction out of me. I thought it was juvenile. I was often told by enlisted members of that team “If you would just go drinking (and, by inference, whoring) with us we would trust you a lot more”. I also did not participate in the common practice of having a second family in Honduras like Lucero and some of those enlisted on the team. Major Lenaghan eventually charged me with violating a minor “offense” (driving alone to Palmerola to get slings for airmobile ops) to cover his ass for not bringing them to us on his way to whore around in Tegucigalpa. This effectively ended my career and chance of making major. It also changed the way I perceived Special Forces – at least of the 7th Special Forces Group (5th was not the morally bankrupt environment 7th was). When I went to the Group Judge Advocate’s Office to fight the accusation they told me “Charging someone in Special Forces with adultery is like issuing a speeding ticket at Indianapolis Speedway”. Despite being offered command of another detachment when the Group Commander, Col. Jacobelly, finally heard the truth, I chose to branch transfer to Military Intelligence to serve out what amount of time I could until being offered early retirement.
When stationed in Korea a married warrant officer in our hootch was sleeping with a female sergeant in direct violation of the 501st MI Brigade commander’s policy (and the UCMJ) against fraternization. The brigade commander had just court-martialed two sergeants first class for the same thing. The second lieutenant in our hootch was the Brigade S-2 and asked me what he should do about it. As the S-2 he was responsible for vetting and maintaining brigade members’ security clearances. Adultery qualifies as “moral torpitude” and grounds for having one’s security clearance revoked or suspended. I told him he should report it to the commander. I backed him up when he did. Because the warrant officer had gotten the brigade through an IG inspection -and he was black-the chain of command didn’t want to hear it. This gave the warrant officer and a captain proctologist (he was really a podiatrist but he was a pain in the ass to me) liberty to harass me about not being “one of them.” I attended the Mormon temple in Seoul every Saturday that year. They started having toga parties in the front yard laughing at me when I returned in my church suit. I used one toilet stall because it didn’t have the porn pictures plastered on the walls of the other stall. They started cutting out newspaper articles describing the “murder of a Green Beret” and other not-so-subtle death threats and porn photos pasting them on the wall of “my” toilet stall. They smeared shit on my bedroom door and pissed on it and on the floor in front of it. I stayed very late at the office to avoid it all but late one evening as I entered the hootch the proctologist came out of his room and asked when I was moving out. I told him I was the senior resident and if anyone was moving it was going to be him. I also told him his commander had told him not to talk to me and he was violating a direct order. Shortly after entering my bedroom I heard MPs’ radios crackling in the hallway. One of them knocked on my door. Without asking me one question he said I was under arrest for threatening to assault the ass doctor. He handcuffed me and led me outside and into the back seat of the MP’s car – overhead lights flashing and in full view of every other officer living on officers’ row. The desk sergeant at the MP station was also an insubordinate ass as I walked in. I was put in a room and allowed to write my statement. About 45 minutes later an SFC entered, apologized and said it was obvious the “others” (two of whom weren’t even there at the time) were lying. I asked him if it was poor training of his subordinates that they didn’t ask my side of the story in a domestic issue like I had done for years as a civilian cop and was standard procedure for any law enforcement officer or was it “just” religious bigotry because I was a Mormon that I was humiliated in front of my peers. The next day a jeep full of Green Beret NCOs from Det-K pulled up beside me as I walked to chow and asked if it was true I was arrested the night before. I said yup. They asked “You want us to come over and kick their asses….SIR?”
So you understand why my interest was piqued by the title of this book.
“On June 1, 1659 Mary Dyer, wearing a plain gray dress, cloak, and bonnet was walked from a prison to the Boston Commons. A row of drummers played to drown out any words of encouragement or prevent her from talking to the crowd. When the commander of the military guard declared she had brought this on herself by defying the law, she responded, “I came to keep blood-guiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law.” A rope was tied to a large elm tree (it would be ironic if it was the famed “Tree of Liberty”) and a ladder propped against it. After she climbed it a noose was placed around her neck and her arms and feet were bound together. The ladder was removed and 25-year old Mary Dyer was executed by the “Holy” Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the crime of….being a Quaker (pgs. 12-13). She could have been hanged for being a Baptist as well. The book mentions the irony of the hypocrisy by just about every religion different from the Puritans having been persecuted in the 16-1700s doing exactly the same thing to each other in the 18-1900s – in America…the Land of the Free.
The religious bigotry of this nation is astounding. Especially considering the hypocritical manner in which many of those who were formerly persecuted themselves persecuted others. It was often for political control – but not always. The author does a good job of objectively presenting some uncomfortable facts about the struggle for religious freedom in this country. I have issues with Muslims and their intolerant doctrine toward “infidels”. But everyone should read this book to give us pause before we smear individuals with the broad paint brush of religious bias.
