By V4 Agency
The anti-religion foundation finds it inappropriate that the FBI has a chaplain who offers prayers at the bureau’s graduation ceremonies, arguing that the FBI cannot support or endorse any religion.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) rejects anything that is related to religion. The organisation promotes the idea that people’s right to religion translates into freedom from religion, which they advocate.
FFRF has pushed back against the FBI after they discovered that the FBI has a chaplain who offers a Christian invocation at the bureau’s graduation ceremonies. This has prompted FFRF to send a letter to the FBI, demanding that it provide a list of anything remotely related to the Christian faith.
The letter says that “It is a fundamental constitutional principle that publicly funded institutions cannot support, promote or otherwise endorse religion or engage in religious exercises.” They argued that “it is inappropriate for a public institution such as the FBI Academy to schedule an invocation as part of a secular graduation ceremony.”
“The FBI is meant to be setting a standard for the entire country in constitutional matters,” FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said, adding that the opposite is happening, as the FBI “is engaging in practices that are alienating to its non-Christian trainees – and to the nation’s non-Christian population at large.”
This is not the first time FFRF has confronted the authorities. Earlier, they wanted to have the motto ‘In God we trust’ removed from Florida police cars because they considered it exclusionary. Annie Laurie Gaylor then said it was frightening that police believed in the judgment of a deity, rather than in the law.
The same anti-religion foundation has also made sure that kids in need would be deprived of the joyous delights of Christmas. FFRF has lodged a complaint with Liberty Middle School in Kansas over the school’s participation in Operation Christmas Child, where students have sent shoeboxes full of gifts to deprived children worldwide.
Eventually, the school caved in to pressure with district superintendent Tony Helfrich stressing how unaware they were of the project’s “sectarian” nature.