Back around Thanksgiving, we brought you
the story of Michael Izbicki, the ensign and Annapolis grad who had
sued the Navy in federal court for turning down his application to be
discharged because his Christian faith had led him become a
conscientious objector. The good news is that after two years the Navy
has seen the error of its ways and granted Izbicki his honorable
discharge. He got the news a month ago, but now the ink is on the paper
and he can leave New London and return to his family in California in
peace.

Paul Vitello does a fine job telling the tale in today’s New York Times,
but there remain a couple of lessons worth pointing up. First, it’s
clear that the Navy and most likely the other services need some
education in how to handle C.O. cases, and specifically in how to reckon
with the varieties of religious experience that can lead personnel in
that direction. Despite having his petition supported by chaplains
inside and outside the military, the officers who received his petition
and the investigators who questioned him had never dealt with a C.O.
case before, and somehow believed that their job was to judge Izbicki
according to their own personal religious lights.

Second, we should bear in mind that however the military personnel on
the ground handle the preliminaries, it’s the lawyers in the Pentagon
who make the decisions once the case gets to court. As Vitello points
out, back in 2007, a West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran won a
discharge only after a long court battle. I have reason to believe that
Izbicki was spared that ordeal because Obama administration lawyers are
now the deciders. Next time religious conservatives begin complaining
about lack of respect for religious conscience under Obama, they should
be reminded of Michael Izbicki.  

Izbicki is the kind of straight arrow who from the
outset said he wanted to reimburse the government for the cost of his
Naval Academy education–as in fact he will be doing. Raised as a
non-denominational evangelical, his reading of the Bible and other
religious literature led him to become a pacifist and a Quaker, and he
supposed that his military superiors would respect him for coming forward with his views.

“The nuclear program in the Navy stresses integrity and honesty,” he told me yesterday.
“And when I showed the Navy what I believed and why…I
thought it would be a straightforward process. It was not nearly as
straightforward as I thought it would be.”