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Navy SEAL Michael Murphy awarded Medal of Honor

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Navy SEAL Michael Murphy wins Medal of Honor
Navy SEAL Michael Murphy wins Medal of Honor

The Washington Examiner reports on the story of a brave Navy SEAL named Michael Murphy. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Engaged in a frenzied firefight and outnumbered by the Taliban, Navy Lt. Michael Murphy made a desperate decision as he and three fellow SEALs fought for their lives on a rocky mountainside in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province in 2005.

In a last-ditch effort to save his team, Murphy pulled out his satellite phone, walked into a clearing to get reception and called for reinforcements as a fusillade of bullets ricocheted around him. One of the bullets hit him, but he finished the call and even signed off, “Thank you.”

Then he continued the battle.

Dan Murphy, the sailor’s father, said it didn’t surprise him that his slain son nicknamed “The Protector” put himself in harm’s way. Nor was he surprised that in the heat of combat his son was courteous.

“That was Michael. He was cool under fire. He had the ability to process information, even under the most difficult of circumstances. That’s what made him such a good SEAL officer,” Murphy said.

A warship bearing the name of the Medal of Honor recipient will be christened Saturday — on what would have been Murphy’s 35th birthday — at Bath Iron Works, where the destroyer is being built.

Murphy, who was 29 when he died, graduated from Pennsylvania State University and was accepted to multiple law schools, but decided he could do more for his country as one of the Navy’s elite SEALS — special forces trained to fight on sea, air and land — the same forces that killed Osama bin Laden this week in Pakistan.

[…]Murphy, of Patchogue, N.Y., earned his nickname after getting suspended in elementary school for fighting with bullies who tried to stuff a special-needs child into a locker and for intervening when some youths were picking on a homeless man, said Dan Murphy, a lawyer, former prosecutor and Army veteran who served in Vietnam.

Maureen Murphy said he thought he was too young to take a desk job as a lawyer. Instead, he went to officer candidate school, the first step on his journey to become a SEAL officer. He was in training during the Sept. 11 attacks, which shaped his views.

His view was that there are “bullies in the world and people who’re oppressed in the world. And he said, ‘Sometimes they have to be taken care of,'” she said.

On June 28, 2005, the day he was killed, Murphy was leading a SEAL team in northeastern Afghanistan looking for the commander of a group of insurgents known as the Mountain Tigers.

What happened to Murphy?

The Operation Red Wings reconnaissance team rappelled down from a helicopter at night and climbed through rain to a spot 10,000 feet high overlooking a village to keep a lookout. But the mission was compromised the following morning when three local goat herders happened upon their hiding spot.

High in the Hindu Kush mountains, Murphy and Petty Officers Marcus Luttrell of Huntsville, Texas; Matthew Axelson of Cupertino, Calif.; and Danny Dietz of Littleton, Colo.; held a tense discussion of the rules of engagement and the fate of the three goat herders, who were being held at gunpoint.

If they were Taliban sympathizers, then letting the herders go would allow them to alert the Taliban forces lurking in the area; killing them might ensure the team’s safety, but there were issues of possible military charges and a media backlash, according to Luttrell, the lone survivor.

Murphy, who favored letting the goat herders go, guided a discussion of military, political, safety and moral implications. A majority agreed with him.

An hour after the herders were released, more than 100 Taliban armed with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades opened fire, attacking from higher elevation, and maneuvering to outflank the SEALs, said Gary Williams, author of “Seal of Honor,” a biography of Murphy.

[…]As the only survivor, Luttrell has pangs of regret for voting to go along with Murphy, his best friend; he now believes the team could’ve survived if the goat herders were killed.

He wasn’t willing to kill unarmed civilians. That’s the difference between the United States and the Muslim terrorists. It’s a moral difference. Michael Murphy was a good man. He used guns and violence to protect others, and he was not willing to kill unarmed civilians.

Here are the requirements for the Army version of the Medal of Honor:

The Medal of Honor is awarded by the President in the name of Congress to a person who, while a member of the Army, distinguishes himself or herself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his or her life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States; while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party. The deed performed must have been one of personal bravery or self-sacrifice so conspicuous as to clearly distinguish the individual above his comrades and must have involved risk of life. Incontestable proof of the performance of the service will be exacted and each recommendation for the award of this decoration will be considered on the standard of extraordinary merit.

I once read an entire book on Medal of Honor award winners in World War II. It’s hard to read those stories, because these people who won the award did amazing acts of bravery, courage and self-sacrifice, but then most of them DIED. The stories almost always end in sadness and grief. Here’s the one that really stuck with me as an example.

On a happier note, what kind of ship do you think would suit Michael Murphy? A merchantman? Hell, no!

USS Michael Murphy DDG 112 Arleigh Burke
USS Michael Murphy DDG 112 Arleigh Burke

Michael Murphy is getting a brand new Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer! Arleigh Burke vessels have the AEGIS missile defense system and their role is to protect carrier strike groups from incoming SSMs and ASMs.

Excerpt:

The Arleigh Burke Class destroyers are equipped with the Aegis combat system which integrates the ship’s sensors and weapons systems to engage anti-ship missile threats.

The Aegis system has a federated architecture with four subsystems – AN/SPY-1 multifunction radar, command and decision system (CDS), Aegis display system (ADS) and the weapon control system (WCS). The CDS receives data from ship and external sensors via satellite communications and provides command, control and threat assessment. The WCS receives engagement instruction from the CDS, selects weapons and interfaces with the weapon fire control systems.

[…]Lockheed Martin is developing the Aegis ballistic missile defence (BMD) capability for the Aegis combat system to engage ballistic missiles with the SM-3 missile. 15 Arleigh Burke destroyers have been fitted with the Aegis BMD system, which provides the capability for long-range surveillance, tracking and engagement of short and medium-range ballistic missiles. The system received US Navy certification for full deployment in September 2006. Work was completed on the 15 destroyers at the end of 2008 and the vessels, with three Ticonderoga cruisers, form the Aegis BMD fleet. On 30 July 2009 the Aegis BMD system was successfully tested by the US Navy on the USS Hopper (DDG 70).Aegis BMD is the main sea-based component of the US ballistic missile defence system.

The weapons control systems include a SWG-1A for Harpoon, SWG-3 for Tomahawk, mk99 mod 3 missile fire control system, GWS34 mod 0 gun fire control system and mk116 mod 7 fire control system for anti-submarine systems.

Only two warships that I know of have the AEGIS system. The DDG Arleigh Burke and the CG Ticonderoga. They are extremely rare and special – just like Michael Murphy.

Michael Murphy was a real hero. It makes me sad that he is gone. But his spirit will live on in the new warship that bears his name.

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Obama administration invents federal anti-bullying law

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From Minding the Campus. (H/T Hans Bader)

Excerpt:

There’s no federal law against bullying or homophobia.  So the Department of Education recently decided to invent one.  On October 26, it sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to the nation’s school districts arguing that many forms of homophobia and bullying violate federal laws against sexual harassment and discrimination.  But those laws only ban discrimination based on sex or race – not sexual orientation, or bullying in general.  The letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights twisted those laws, interpreting them so broadly as to cover not only bullying, but also a vast range of constitutionally protected speech, as well as conduct that the Supreme Court has held does not constitute harassment.  In so doing, it menaced academic freedom and student privacy rights, and thumbed its nose at the federal courts.

[…]The Education Department’s letter, from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, flouts the Supreme Court’s harassment definition, claiming that “Harassment does not have to . . . involve repeated incidents” to be actionable, but rather need only be “severe, pervasive, or persistent” enough to detract from a student’s educational benefits or activities.  The letter goes out of its way to emphasize that harassment includes speech, such as “graphic and written statements” and on the “Internet.”

The letter falsely implies that anti-gay harassment is generally discrimination based on sex.  It cites as an example of illegal “gender-based harassment” a case in which “a gay high school student was called names (including anti-gay slurs and sexual comments) both to his face and on social networking sites.”  This is exactly what most federal appeals courts have said does not constitute gender-based harassment.  It is not clear whether this case is merely a hypothetical example, or – more disturbingly — a finding by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in an actual case.  The letter says that “each of these hypothetical examples contains elements taken from actual cases.”

If it actually found a school district guilty of harassment over this, then the Education Department has flagrantly disregarded court rulings, not just about what harassment is, but about how officials are supposed to respond to harassment.  In this example of anti-gay harassment, the Education Department says the school district is liable for harassment even though “the school responded to complaints from the student by reprimanding the perpetrators,” which stopped “harassment by those individuals,” because such discipline “did not, however, stop others from undertaking similar harassment of the student.”

That totally contradicts the Supreme Court’s Davis decision, which said school districts are not liable for harassment just because it continues, and are only liable if they are “deliberately indifferent” to harassment once they learn of it; they need not actually succeed in “purging schools of actionable peer harassment” or ensuring that all “students conform their conduct to” rules against harassment.

Even in the workplace, where institutions are liable for mere “negligence” regarding harassment, they are not liable for harassment that continues after steps “reasonably calculated” to prevent harassment – such as when employees stubbornly engage in harassment for which other employees have already been properly disciplined, as a federal appeals court ruled in Adler v. Wal-Mart (1998).  Indeed, an institution may sometimes avoid liability even where there was no discipline at all, if it was unclear whether the accused employee was guilty, given due-process concerns.

Essentially, the Education Department has turned harassment law upside down, making schools more liable for harassment than employers, when the Supreme Court intended that they be less subject to liability.  (The Education Department letter also suggests racial “sensitivity” training – never mind that this often backfires on institutions.  In Fitzgerald v. Mountain States Tel & Tel. Co. (1995), where adverse employee reactions to diversity training spawned a discrimination lawsuit, the appeals court noted that “diversity training sessions generate conflict and emotion” and that “diversity training is perhaps a tyranny of virtue.”)

The letter also implies that it does not matter whether speech is “aimed at a specific target” in considering whether the speech is “harassment.”  This stretches harassment law well beyond its existing reach even in the workplace, effectively prohibiting a vast range of speech that a listener overhears and objects to.  Employees have tended to lose lawsuits alleging harassment over speech not aimed at them (the California Supreme Court’s 2006 Lyle decision being a classic example), although there are occasional exceptions to this rule.  The courts reason that “the impact of such ‘second-hand’ harassment is obviously not as great as harassment directed toward” the complainant herself.

Banning such speech also raises serious First Amendment issues.  Recently a federal appeals court cited the First Amendment in dismissing a racial harassment lawsuit by a university’s Hispanic employees against a white professor over his racially-charged  anti-immigration messages.   In its decision in Rodriguez v. Maricopa County Community College (2010), the court noted that the messages were not “directed at particular individuals” but rather aimed at “the college community” as a whole.

So the state has basically decided to use the government-run school system, which is funded through compulsory taxation, to potentially criminalize speech critical of certain Democrat special interest groups.

All sensible people are opposed to “bullying” and “harassment” – when someone hits someone else in a school or workplace, that should be stopped. Because schools are a place of learning, just as businesses are a place of working. But this administration is going beyond the punishment of actual crimes to punish thoughts that disagree with their their thoughts. This is just fascism – the imposition of moral values and beliefs by the state onto individuals through the use of threats, coercion and force. And you can bet that conservative groups – like the pro-life groups who are regularly banned from speaking – will not be the beneficiaries of these laws.

To learn more about Kevin Jennings, the man Obama has appointed to spearhead this efforts, read this post at Gateway Pundit. And this post at Gateway Pundit.

News

What is the real solution to child obesity and bullying?

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From the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

Call it the Nanny State run amok. By hosting an all-day White House conference on adolescent bullying last week, President Obama elevated a schoolyard issue to the level of public enemy No. 1, perhaps on a par with the first lady’s labors on behalf of childhood obesity.Typical of all federal “preventions” that mobilize the Departments of Education or Health and Human Services on behalf of some perceived crisis, none of the players of the conference had the guts to yank at the underlying root of the bullying culture: family breakdown.

[…]In a national study of nearly 2,500 Norwegian boys and girls ages 12 to 15 published in the November issue of European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, researchers found a substantial statistical correlation between both victims and aggressors of bullying and parental divorce.

Given that both victims and aggressors of bullying, relative to their noninvolved peers, were also found to experience more psychological problems, the parental-divorce link should not be surprising.

The distress of parental breakup, the Norwegian researchers claim, leaves adolescents emotionally vulnerable and therefore easy targets for bullies among their peers.

At the same time, parental divorce incubates bullying by leaving adolescents, according to study, with “less monitoring, often fewer adults to confide in, and sometimes increased aggression because of feelings of loss.”

[…]Yet this common-sense understanding of bullying wasn’t entertained at the White House. If this were the first time Team Obama ignored the data, it might not be troubling.

Instead, a disturbing pattern is emerging: The first lady’s high-profile campaign against childhood obesity suffers the same blind spot. Paralleling the Norway study on bullying, recent research on obesity finds that children of divorced or single parents suffer another disadvantage to their well-being: higher risks of being overweight.

For example, scholars at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work in Miami, writing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last July, found that children in single-parent households, relative to their peers from two-parent households, were more likely to be “overweight” and nearly three-quarters as likely to be “obese,” or seriously overweight (odds ratio: 1.72). Kids from broken homes were also more likely to have higher cholesterol levels and lower HDL levels, indicators of type 2 diabetes.

By not keeping up with the research, the White House ends up, as it did last week with the bullying conference, calling for greater public “interventions” by education and health authorities to address the problem.

Democrats are ignorant. They attack traditional marriage because marriage supports “unequal gender roles”, which is incompatible with feminism. They think that stay-at-home moms can be replaced by strangers and that children will not be adversely affected. And then when massive social problems result from the destruction of marriage, they resort to legislating higher taxes and more social programs – draining money out of the families that are left to subsidize more broken homes. Single mother families are the leading cause of child poverty. It’s a death spiral, and it’s going to continue until people stop acting irresponsibly and expecting their neighbors to bail them out.