Deborah Schoenfeld says she was harassed at a Fort Meade, Md., dental clinic for her Hindu faith and then fired when she complained about it.<\/span>
<\/span> The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is representing a former Air Force contractor who says she was fired from a dental clinic at Fort Meade, Maryland, after complaining that her co-workers discriminated against her because she was Hindu. She claims they then accused her of being a witch.<\/span>
<\/span> Group founder and president Mikey Weinstein wrote in a letter to officials: \u201cWe have spoken with witnesses at the clinic under your command who have universally confirmed that, not only did this horrid harassment take place, but ever since the execution of her punishment for failing the religious test imposed by the leadership of Epes Dental Clinic, a particular offending party has effusively celebrated her replacement by a Catholic woman by saying publicly that \u2018It’s good to see we got an angel, since last time we had the devil.\u2019\u201d<\/span>
<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span> Reached by Air Force Times, Deborah Schoenfeld said that her co-workers at the Epes Dental Clinic harassed her over her Hindu faith, claiming she was satanic for wanting to practice yoga and meditating.<\/span>
<\/span> Speaking on condition of anonymity, two of her former co-workers confirmed Schoenfeld’s account to Air Force Times and said that other employees at the dental clinic are devoutly Christian and deeply suspicious of Hinduism. One of them confirmed that she was referred to as a “Hindu witch.”<\/span>
<\/span> One co-worker, who Schoenfeld said prayed for her to find Jesus, told her that meditation summons demons, adding that \u201call the soldiers who are doing meditation and yoga to help their PTSD, they are getting infected also,\u201d Schoenfeld said.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen her requests for help through the chain of command went nowhere, she filed a formal complaint on Sept. 2, Schoenfeld said. That day, she was fired for allegedly using profanity against a co-worker, although she was not allowed to know who had accused her of doing so, she said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis is something that is counter to the discipline and good order of the military, and yet it continues.<\/p>\n
The USAF in particular has problems with this, which is unsurprising, since their academy is a neighbor of the Talibaptist organization “Focus on the Family” in Colorado Springs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m beginning to think that sees itself as a branch of Oral Roberts University. In the latest episode of stupidity in the service, or at least the latest episode that doesn’t involve the over priced and under performing F-35, the Air Force has fired a dental technician for being a witch. In an even bigger …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,971,975,969,1006,1021],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-civil-rights","category-employment","category-evil","category-military","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}