Everyone has seen the flag folding ceremony. I don’t need to explain what it is. They do it at the funerals of veterans. At least they used to:
A federal agency has banned flag-folding recitations at U.S. veterans cemeteries after a complaint over religious content.
The Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise said the recitation, used at thousands of military burials, explains the significance of each of the 13 folds of the flag.
The newspaper said a complaint was lodged against the words for the 11th fold, which “celebrates Jewish war veterans and “glorifies the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”
Mike Nacincik, a spokesman for the National Cemetery Administration, said the complaint originated from someone who witnessed the ceremony at Riverside National Cemetery in California, the newspaper said.
So one jackass at a veteran’s funeral gets to dictate what happens at every other funeral from now on. This is ridiculous! How much can this nation put up with?
Looking at it from another angle, to show how utterly asinine this ban is:
A funeral is a ceremony marking a person’s death. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember the dead, from the funeral itself, to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in their honor. These customs vary widely between cultures, and between religious affiliations within cultures. In some cultures the dead are venerated; this is commonly called ancestor worship. The word funeral comes from the Latin funus, which had a variety of meanings, including the corpse and the funerary rites themselves.
Funeral rites are as old as the human race itself, as well as other hominids. For example, in the Shanidar cave in Iraq, Neanderthal skeletons have been discovered with a characteristic layer of pollen, which suggests that Neanderthals buried the dead with gifts of flowers. This has been interpreted as suggesting that Neanderthals believed in an afterlife, and in any case were aware of their own mortality and were capable of mourning.
It seems to me that the funeral is a religious ceremony in and of itself. Why not just ban funerals? Or better yet, how about you mind your own business and stop making a political statement out of someone’s loss? Is that too much to ask of you religion haters?
