MRFF Covered in Newsweek Lead Article on Supreme Court Potentially Ruling on Ten Commandments in Schools

Friday Afternoon, July 18, 2025

MRFF COVERED IN NEWSWEEK LEAD ARTICLE

ON SUPREME COURT POTENTIALLY RULING

ON TEN COMMANDMENTS IN SCHOOLS,

POSSIBLY IMPACTING DOD PUBLIC SCHOOLS

“The point is that the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court will decide what they want and then try to rationalize it. So, it's useless to look at any of the prior cases. I fully expect the Supreme Court will allow this in Arkansas, Louisiana,

wherever the hell else it's going to be, red states.”

— MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein,

quoted by Newsweek

Supreme Court building with big cross superimposed

NEWSWEEK

COVERS MRFF

Supreme Court May Soon Consider

Overturning 45-Year Precedent

By: Nick Mordowanec

Friday, July 18, 2025

With red states passing laws to require the Ten Commandments in public schools currently being challenged in the lower courts, Newsweek examines the very likely possibility of these cases reaching the Supreme Court.

MRFF’s Mikey Weinstein, copiously quoted in the article, told Newsweek:

“The point is that the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court will decide what they want and then try to rationalize it,” Weinstein said. “So, it's useless to look at any of the prior cases. I fully expect the Supreme Court will allow this in Arkansas, Louisiana, wherever the hell else it's going to be, red states.

“I’m old enough to remember—I was born and raised in Albuquerque, but I'm a military brat—being forced to be in a Christmas play as a little Jewish kid in a public school. ... Christian nationalism is this weaponized version of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that is antithetical in every way to what our Constitution is about.

“Our constitutional framers looked at Europe, where most of the bloodshed had happened, there had been when men of the cloth, men in political power—they looked at the Salem Witch Trials, they said, ‘We are not going to do that here,’ so they carved this chasm, this canyon between spiritual and temporal in our basic foundational document.”

It is “not a small thing” to put the Ten Commandments up in the classroom, he added, wondering why Christianity is paramount in these displays rather than, say, erecting the Code of Hammurabi.

Click to read on Newsweek

The below email was sent to MRFF’s Mikey Weinstein

in 2022 by Ellery Schempp, the primary student in the

landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case Abington School District v. Schempp, the case in which Bible readings in public schools were ruled unconstitutional, one of the long-standing rulings that are now at risk

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

From: Ellery Schempp

Subject: brick for courage and pioneering

Date: February 9, 2022 at 9:18:14 PM MST

To: "'Mikey Weinstein'" <mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org>

Dear Mikey and MRFF,

Mikey Weinstein is a wonderful and courageous real pioneer. The ACLU, for all the good they do, was reluctant to reach into the military. Likewise Americans United and Freedom from Religion FFRF, and American Atheists and Humanists--all are great allies. But the gap between the civilian and military worlds could only be bridged by Mikey. Using the UCMJ, using their oaths to our Constitution, this is something only Mikey has been able to do.

The military brass is not noted for being gentle toward dissenters, and the ranks have attracted zealots and bigots and hypocrites of many stripes. The violent and threatening mail you get – and handle so wittily – is evidence of your courage.

With hearty applause for Mikey and the MRFF team,

Ellery Schempp

Happy Tiger New Year.

Click to read more

Long-time MRFF supporter Rabbi Joel Schwartzman reacts to MRFF filing federal lawsuit against the Air Force Academy over FOIA request regarding the Academy’s scheduling of important training on Yom Kippur

Thursday, May 15, 2025

From: Rabbi Joel Schwartzman

Subject: The Commandant's Repeated Screw Up--Training Schedule on a Jewish High Holiday

Date: July 15, 2025 at 6:44:46 AM MDT

To: "info@militaryreligiousfreedom.org" <info@militaryreligiousfreedom.org>

Cc: Michael L Weinstein <mikeyw4444@icloud.com>

Of all the institutions that ought to be in the forefront of defending the freedom of religion and of the rights of its members to observe their holy days, one would think that our service academies would be first among equals. Not so the Air Force Academy!

Once again, the Commandant’s office has scheduled cadet training for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, thereby compromising its Jewish cadets’ religious obligations. Yom Kippur, a fast day lasting twenty-six hours, isn’t a day which can be divided up into segments, a morning for worship services, the afternoon for having to return to training.

Traditionally, since my own days as a Jewish chaplain stationed at the United States Air Force Academy from 1983 to 1986, this is the compromise that the Commandant’s office offered, take it or leave it. By regulation, Jewish cadets also were forbidden to fast. This was absolutely outrageous!

Think of Yom Kippur as being as important a holy day as Christmas or Easter. Would the Commandant’s office dare to lay on a day of training on these or any Christian holidays? Think, then, of the strain that having to sacrifice one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, singularly the most important of the High Holidays, places on a Jewish cadet. Clearly the Academy is telling Jewish cadets that their religious rites and rituals simply must take a backseat to the Commandant’s program and that they must bend their religious obligations to this terrible compromise.

When queried about this religious screw-up, the Commandant’s office replied that it was, indeed, “an oversight.” Frankly, this answer is pure crap! It is the very same excuse I received when I objected to the use of this date and when I was at the Academy. Clearly, either no one in the Commandant’s shack cares to cite a religious calendar, or they simply don’t care about anyone else’s holidays except the Christian ones. That is blatant discrimination bordering on religious bigotry. If there is anything like a continuity file in the offices of the Commandant (and if there isn’t, there darned well should be!), the officer in charge of scheduling ought to have known not to put training on the date of Yom Kippur, and if it could not be avoided altogether, they ought not to have, once again, been twisting the arms of Jewish cadets to fulfill something that ought never to have been levied in the first place.

Once again, it is maddening to hear from the office of the Commandant the very same lame excuse it has used now for decades. This business wreaks, at least, of incompetence, but more so of a “we don’t give a damn” attitude which seeks to hide behind an obfuscation that claims having once again failed to correct an “oversight,” because it knows that it can get away with it, and will run rough shod over the cadets to whom it is supposed to be teaching military ethics, one of which is to honor the religions of all military members.

The Superintendent of the Air Force Academy could resolve this conflict in a flash. Whether she corrects the Commandant’s blatant and callous act or not will say a great deal more about the institution. But the buck need not stop at the level of the Academy’s leadership. Continuing to offer up the same excuse cannot be allowed to stand. It may well be time for the Air Force’s Inspector General to step in, and if that office, too, is unresponsive, then this may be an issue for Congress. Thereafter, the remedy may lie with the court system.

Ultimately this sort of discriminatory act must be met head on and be resolved in favor of the individual cadet who truly does have rights in the system of a service academy even if that organization attempts to exercise an unconstitutional power over him or her over which the cadet has limited facilities with which to deal.

Rabbi Joel R. Schwartzman

Ch, Col, USAF (Ret)