Army Aviation unit faces legal trouble over “religious” unit insignia

An Army aviation unit out of Alabama is under fire- and it isn’t in Afghanistan.

According to Al, the Fort Rucker-based 212th Aviation Regiment has become the main focus of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation due to its “Crusaders” unit nickname and insignia, which bears the non-secular crusader’s cross.

The United States Army has resisted the demands to change the insignia, though the religious freedoms group is threatening to take them to Federal court.

MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein -the same individual who has lodged complaints this year with the US Air Force Academy and other installations- contends that his organization has received complaints from US and foreign soldiers of various religious preferences based at Fort Rucker.

“We have 42 families that live in Fort Rucker, and 23 of them are practitioners of the Christian faith,” said Weinstein. “Either we have Roman Catholics and Protestants, the others are Islamic, Jewish, they are native American, spiritualists and others atheists, agnostics, humanists or secularists, and they are not going to take it anymore.”

The unit takes its name from the historical Crusades, which was a series of Christian military operations into primarily what is now modern-day Israel and the eastern Mediterranean, with objectives to purge Christian lands of Muslims.

The 212th is a training unit that provides combat and night training on helicopters such as the UH-60 Black Hawk, OH-58 Kiowa and UH-1 Iroquois.

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