Moon phase: Waxing gibbous Weather: hot, humid, thunderstorming Yesterday the Post had an interesting and sad article on a Wiccan army sargeant who was killed in Afghanistan last year, who ought to have had a memorial in his local veterans cemetary in Nevada, except that the US Department of Veterans Affairs refuses to recognize the Wiccan symbol, the pentagram. They gave his wife the option of having a blank memorial with just his name, but she decided to forgo a memorial there altogether. The VA recognizes 38 religious symbols — including one for atheists, an atomic symbol with an A in the center — but efforts to secure recognition of the pentagram in recent years have failed. This is, of course, completely unfair and unconstitutional. I don't even see why the VA needs to recognize symbols anyway — shouldn't the veterans themselves have the right to decide what they want on their graves, without any of this beaurocratic nonsense? But I also think it's interesting to note that though Sikhs have an accepted symbol in the VA, there are (according to a quick Google search) only about 500,000 Sikhs in the US and more than 700,000 Neo-pagans (note that most Neo-pagans are Wiccans, and even among those that aren't, most use the pentagram as their primary religious symbol). That's not to say that there are necessarily more Neo-pagans in the military than there are Sikhs, especially since many Neo-pagans are pacifists, but it just goes to show that it has nothing to do with Wicca being a fringe religion or anything like that; it's all about prejudice. There's still a perception in our country that Wicca is equivalent with Satanism, and probably the VA just doesn't want to have graves with the pentagram on them.