Defense Secretary invites a pastor who has argued women should not vote to lead the Pentagon prayer service.

The pastor in question is Douglas Wilson. The pulpit in question is the Pentagon’s internal Christian worship service, a monthly observance instituted by the Secretary of Defense in his first months in office. Wilson preached for fifteen minutes on Tuesday, on the building’s internal television network, on the merits of putting Jesus Christ first.

The biographical material on Mr. Wilson is the part that requires the careful editor.

Wilson, in print, has argued that wives must submit to their husbands. He has argued, also in print, that women should not vote. He has co-authored a pamphlet on the antebellum South in which he argued that Christian enslavers, in the Southern United States, occupied “firm scriptural ground.” He runs a network of classical Christian schools, one of which the Secretary’s children attend. The Secretary moved his family to Tennessee in 2022 in part to enroll them in that network. The Secretary is, on the public record, a member of one of Wilson’s affiliated churches.

The Pentagon, asked to defend the invitation, said the prayer service is voluntary, that no service member is required to attend, and that the Department of Defense supports the religious expression of its leaders.

These are, separately, all defensible propositions. The prayer service is voluntary. The Secretary is entitled to his religion. The Department of Defense has a chaplaincy.

What the Pentagon has not addressed, and what the press shop will not address absent further questions, is the matter of the public statement made when the Department invites a man who has argued in writing for the disenfranchisement of women, the submission of wives, and the scriptural defense of enslavement to deliver a sermon, on government television, in the building from which the United States military is administered. Half the active-duty force is, by demographic, in the categories Mr. Wilson’s writings would relegate. The signal of the invitation, regardless of the merits of any individual sermon, is the part to mark.

The Secretary, asked about the sermon afterward, said he had been running from another meeting and missed the remarks. This is, from the office that scheduled the speaker, an unusual disclaimer. The man who issued the invitation did not, on the morning of the event, find time to hear the man he had invited.

A woman in active-duty uniform, watching the broadcast in her office on Tuesday, was therefore listening to a sermon her superior officer had not heard, in a building her superior officer runs, by a preacher her superior officer had selected, on theological grounds her superior officer would not, on the public record, walk her through.

Calmly documenting the decline.