Judiciously Lunatic

What kind of insubstantial, nonsensical courtroom dynamics is it supposed to represent when in a military court a man who is charged with killing thirteen people and wounding an additional 32, keeps having his trial postponed because the judge takes issue with the man having grown a beard.  The man happens to be a major in the U.S. military.  He happens also to be a mass murderer. 

Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a military psychiatrist, was fundamentally ill placed in the U.S. military.  Raised as an American, he was also raised a Muslim.  And within him a battle royal raged between his loyalties.  His growing contempt for all that the United States' values represented in contrast to the life-values of a religion that demands complete submission of its followers, though increasingly evident to others failed to serve as a warning of danger ahead.

Major Hasan went about his business as a career military man, badly misplaced within a society that strives heroically to see no 'differences' between people of different heritage, culture, religion and experience.  In American citizen-lore the perfection of Americanism overcomes all obstacles, and one becomes honour-bound to accept and to value and to practise those priorities and values that Americans hold dear.

A burning resentment lodged deep in the soul of Nidal Malik Hasan rejected all that.  His American loyalties steadily receded in pace with his aggrieved religious and ethnic realizations that there was great incompatibility between his cultural background of origin and the sanctity of religious observation, complicated by the belief that his adopted country was vilifying and oppressing his heritage.

When his U.S. loyalty finally snapped leaving only an aggravated sense of jihad and martyrdom to avenge what he saw as wrongs done those of his religion and his ethnic-heritage, his choice was made and he acted in a barbaric display of discipline to death and destruction in the greater glory of Islam when he called Allahu Akbar! and restored himself to perfect Islamism.

So in the face of all this, why the issue of a beard seen to be defiant of military dress and appearance codes assuming any kind of priorities, seems just about as picayune and absurd as anyone can get.  Can judge Col. Gregory Gross really be serious about this, or is he just having grim fun out of this atrocious situation.  The military dress code is irrelevant to the fact that Major Hasan chose to kill his military peers, rejecting his nation, his citizenship, his oaths of loyalty.

Major Hasan's defence argues that repeated fines imposed upon their client for his seemingly unforgivable insubordination to military rules represents an unconstitutional situation.  Major Hasan, even in the background of all that went before, argues the federal Freedom Restoration Act gives him permission to wear his beard in honour of his religion.

But Col. Gross as the presiding judge and arbiter insists the plaintiff's lawyers have not provided relevant evidence, and fines him yet again $1,000.  Get serious, please; this man with his distorted sense of values murdered 13 people, injured another 32, and the court argues about a beard?  In the name of sanity, get on with it!