Tuesday, November 14, 2006

The pentacle and the Pentagon

We've followed this story for quite a while now: Patrick Stewart was a wiccan soldier killed in Afghanistan, and his widow Roberta wants a pentacle placed on his grave marker. The Pentagon refuses. The matter now appears headed for court.

Oddly enough, the military used to be rather more tolerant. I knew a Wiccan priestess who told me that, in the 1980s, she conducted a "handfasting" ceremony (what we mundane folk call marriage) on the Battleship Missouri.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Handfasting. Reminds me of a girl I used to know...

Anonymous said...

Andy Rooney was on some show or another and was talking about visiting WWII graveyards and some other stuff.....but he said something that pretains to this post.
He said, every grave either has a cross or a star of David on it.
He then said, I do not think that everyone who died in WWII would have wanted to have such symbols placed on their graves.
There is a definate bias in the military to be sure!

Anonymous said...

from http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s2i12099

Washington DC - (Associated Mess): The Wiccans' tombstones fight is getting dirty at the US District Court in Madison and the US Appeals Court in Washington DC as a group of enraged pagans vowed today to hex the hell out of warmongering creationist nutters running the Bush Administration who have blocked their civil and religious funerary rights for over nine years.

I just love that line -- "warmongering creationist nutters"

.R.S.E.