LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY zarq)

Text before the line is excerpted from a much longer article in today's Washington Post. I added the links and anything in parentheses)

"A military watchdog group is asking the Defense Department to investigate whether seven Army and Air Force officers violated regulations by appearing in uniform in a promotional video for an evangelical Christian organization. In the video, much of which was filmed inside the Pentagon, four generals and three colonels praise the Christian Embassy, a group that evangelizes among military leaders, politicians and diplomats in Washington. Some of the officers describe their efforts to spread their faith within the military.
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Pete Geren, a former acting secretary of the Air Force who oversaw the service's response in 2005 to accusations that evangelical Christians were pressuring cadets at the Air Force Academy, also appears in the video. The Christian Embassy "has been a rock that I can rely on, been an organization that helped me in my walk with Christ, and I'm just thankful for the service they give," he says. (More on the 2005 controversy here, here, here and here. Most notable, from that last link, 70 members of the House tried to get the DoD to lighten restrictions imposed after the scandal. Unsurprisingly, most were Republican.)

The 10-minute video is on the group's Web site, Christianembassy.com. The organization was founded nearly 30 years ago by the late Bill Bright, who also founded Campus Crusade for Christ. (Their URL is crusade.org -- that's such a nice historical shout-out, isn't it?) The Christian Embassy Web site says the group holds prayer breakfasts each Wednesday in the Pentagon's executive dining room and organizes small groups to help military leaders "bridge the gap between faith and work."

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Defense Department regulations bar personnel from appearing in uniform in "speeches, interviews, picket lines, marches, rallies or any public demonstration . . . which may imply Service sanction of the cause for which the demonstration or activity is conducted." The disclaimer on the website before the video notwithstanding, it seems quite clear that the officers in question violated that simply by appearing in their uniforms.