Mikey Weinstein is the undisputed leader of the national movement to restore the obliterated wall separating church and state in the most technologically lethal organization ever created by humankind: the United States armed forces. Described by Harper’s magazine as the constitutional conscience of the U.S. military, a man determined to force accountability, Mikey’s family has a long and distinguished U.S. military history spanning three consecutive generations of military academy graduates and over 130 years of combined active duty military service in every major combat engagement our country has been in from World War I to the current Global War on Terror.
Mikey is a 1977 Honor Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. Mikey has been married for over 33 years to his wife, Bonnie. He is the proud parent of two sons and one daughter. His oldest son and daughter-in-law are 2004 Graduates, and Mikey’s youngest son graduated in the Class of 2007 from the Air Force Academy and is the sixth member of Mikey’s family to attend the Academy. His father is a distinguished graduate of the United States Naval Academy. Mikey spent 10 years in the Air force as a “JAG” or military attorney serving as both a Federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney.
A registered Republican, he also spent over three years in the West Wing of the Reagan Administration as legal counsel in the White House. In his final position there, Mikey was named the Committee Management Officer of the much-publicized Iran-Contra Investigation in his capacity as Assistant General Counsel of The White House Office of Administration, Executive Office of the President of the United States. Mikey has held numerous positions in corporate America as a senior executive businessman and attorney.
After stints at prominent law firms in both New York City and Washington D.C., Mikey served as the first General Counsel to Texas billionaire and two-time Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot and Perot Systems Corporation. He left Mr. Perot’s employ in 2006 to focus his fulltime attention on the nonprofit charitable foundation he founded to directly battle the far-right militant radical evangelical religious fundamentalists: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. (http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org)
Mikey has appeared innumerable times on all of the major cable and terrestrial TV news networks and is a frequent guest on national radio networks as well. His constitutional activism has been covered and profiled extensively in the print media including the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Denver Post, The Guardian and many other national and international newspapers and periodicals including Time magazine.
St. Martins Press in New York released Mikey’s book, “With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military” in October 2006. The paperback version was released in February 2008 with the Foreword being written by Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV. The book is an expose on the systemic problem of religious intolerance throughout the United States armed forces. Mikey recently made his international film debut in the Hollywood adaptation of James Carroll’s New York Times best selling book detailing the 2,000 year bloody history between the Church and the Jews, entitled “Constantine’s Sword”, and directed by Oscar nominee Oren Jacoby.
Mikey was named one of the 50 most influential Jews in America by the Forward, one of the nation’s preeminent Jewish publications. He also has received a nomination for the JFK’s Profile in Courage Award and received the Buzzflash Wings of Justice Award. In addition Mikey was honored by a distinguished civil rights organization Jews for Racial and Economic Justice with the Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer Risk-Taker Award, for those who have taken extraordinary risks in the pursuit of justice.
Reviled by the militant radical evangelical fundamentalist Christian far-right, Mikey has been given many names by his enemies including Satan, Satan’s lawyer, the Antichrist, That Godless, Secular Leftist, The Antagonizer of All Christians, The Most Dangerous Man in America and, most recently and perhaps most colorfully, The Field General of the Godless Armies of Satan.
On October 15, 2009, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation was officially nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. The nominator, who wishes to remain anonymous, happens to be the only Christian in the upper chamber of his country’s national parliament; the country is an ally of the United States. Shortly thereafter, another anonymous Qualified Nominator submitted a second official nomination for MRFF for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. On October 13, 2010, for the second consecutive year, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation was officially nominated again for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
On November 30, 2010, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State announced that Mikey Weinstein would become AU’s first ever “Person of the Year” in 2011. In their press release, AU describes MRFF as “the leading voice protecting church-state separation in the military.”
