I’ve blogged on this before. Happily, there’s finally a “happy” ending.
To settle a lawsuit, the Department of Veterans Affairs has agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans’ headstones.
The settlement, which was reached on Friday, was announced today by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which represented the plaintiffs in the case. The Veterans Affairs Department confirmed the settlement
[…] “The Wiccan families we represented were in no way asking for special treatment,” the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, said at a news conference today. “They wanted precisely the same treatment that dozens of other religions already had received from the department, an acknowledgment that their spiritual beliefs were on par with those of everyone else.”
A Veterans Affairs spokesman, Matt Burns, confirmed that the “V.A. will be adding the pentacle to its list of approved emblems of belief that will be engraved on government-provided markers.
The official reason for the VA dragging its heels may never be known, but …
In reviewing 30,000 pages of documents from Veterans Affairs, Americans United said it found e-mails and memoranda referring to negative comments that President Bush made about Wicca during a 1999 interview with the ABC program “Good Morning America,” when he was governor of Texas. The interview had to do with a controversy at the time about Wiccan soldiers being allowed to worship at Fort Hood in Texas.
“I don’t think witchcraft is a religion,” Mr. Bush said at the time, according to a transcript. “ I would hope the military officials would take a second look at the decision they made.”
Americans United did not assert that the White House influenced the Veterans Affairs Department. Under the terms of the settlement, Americans United had to return the documents and could not copy them, although the group could make limited comments about their contents, Mr. Katskee said.
It’s about time.
And … there it is — lucky number 37.
(via Margie)
Woot and Huzzah!