The issue of Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s Wiccan memorial marker “has legs,” as I would have said in my newspaper reporter days.
Driving to school today, I heard Carl Kasell update the story on NPR’s Morning Edition, and it occurred to me that that was the first time I had heard Wicca mentioned in an NPR newscast, as best I can remember. (I know that I heard it, but I cannot find a link. Hmm…)
NPR was probably following this Washington Post report.
There is the usual bureaucratic bafflegab:
Department spokeswoman Josephine Schuda said VA turned down Wiccans in the past because religious groups used to be required to list a headquarters or central authority, which Wicca does not have. But that requirement was eliminated last year, she noted.
“I really have no idea why it has taken so long” for the Wiccan symbol to gain approval, Schuda said.
His widow, Roberta, is supposed to be meeting this week with some undersecretary-for-something-or-other about the VA’s reluctance to admit the presence of Pagan military personnel.
In 1993, after the first Gulf War, Llewellyn published Circles, Groves, and Sanctuaries by Dan and Pauline Campanelli. It’s out of print now, of course, thanks to Llewellyn’s short-press-run philosophy and the federal tax code. You can find it on Advanced Book Exchange, though.
It included a photo of a soldier’s Wiccan circle in the desert of Kuwait (as I recall). I reckoned that that might have been one of the first Pagan rituals celebrated in that part of the world in about 1,300 years.
What I wanted to see was an M1 Abrams tank nicknamed “Chariot of Ishtar” (painted on the hull in English and cuneiform, please) rolling through Baghdad.