Earlier this month, we posted a video of Colorado GOP state legislator and Religious Right activist Gordon Klingenschmitt tying himself in knots attempting to defend the right of a school district to discriminate against atheists. This week, Klingenschmitt outdid himself when he spent six minutes on his “Pray In Jesus Name” program justifying a decision by the Citadel to deny “a request from an incoming Muslim student to wear a traditional religious headscarf as part of her uniform.”
Klingenschmitt, who claims to be a champion of the freedom of religious expression in the military and has even created his own bogus persecution account, said that he could not support allowing a female Muslim soldier to wear a headscarf along with her uniform because it was a signal to Muslim combatants to rape the other female soldiers instead of her.
Klingenschmitt cited passages from Sura 33 in the Quran that he falsely claimed give Muslim men the right to rape any woman who is not wearing proper covering during times of war. As such, he said, if a female Muslim soldier was allowed to wear a headscarf, then she would be signaling to our enemies that she is a Muslim who should not be raped, but that it was okay for them to rape the non-Muslim female soldiers.
“If you’re at war and you’re looking out over the battlefield and you’re wondering which women are safe to rape,” he said, “you don’t [rape] the women with headscarves because those are Muslims and you do rape the women without headscarves because those are not Muslims.”
“The Citadel is thinking about letting a woman wear a headscarf with her military uniform as a symbol that the other women are open to be raped and she is not open to be raped by Muslims,” Klingenschmitt stated. “It’s a symbol to your Muslim enemies — we fight terrorists who are often Muslim — it’s a symbol to them, ‘please don’t rape me, rape the other women in uniform because they’re not wearing a headscarf.'”
