What do you think should happen when an American war hero, a Green Beret, learns from a distraught mother that her son has been sexually abused by an Afghan national serving on a US military base in Afghanistan? What would be the right thing to do? SFC Charles  Martland is the NCO who received this complaint, and he took immediate action to expel the offending Afghan national from the US military base. SFC Martland punished a bully for abusing a child.

There was ample justification for this action. Sexual abuse of a minor is not just morally reprehensible. It is illegal.

Sexual abuse of a minor is

• A violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice
• A violation of international law
• A violation of Afghanistan’s criminal code

Yet this behavior is tolerated, considered risible, by Afghan men who pretend they are saving themselves for marriage by raping young boys instead of young women for their sexual pleasure.

SFC Martland did what any US NCO or commissioned officer should have done when this offense was reported by the mother of the abused child. Yet SFC Martland’s reward for faithful service and the good judgment to do the right thing is to be court-martialed and dismissed from the Army.

This story should bring cold chills to the heart of any Christian American citizen. If a man like SFC Martland can be punished rather than rewarded for taking action to protect a child from sexual abuse, what can happen to any other citizen who takes the same sort of action? What is the US government’s real attitude toward child sexual abuse?

One must look at the secular teachings about sex, and then one must look at the action of the federal government that aligns with secular teaching about sex.

Secularists teach that sexual orientation is an immutable trait of an individual, present at birth and not controllable or changeable by mental health therapy. Secularists also teach that since homosexual attraction is immutable, it must not be punished or regarded as abnormal. After establishing a platform of immutability and normality for homosexual behavior in the culture, the secular agenda then achieved part of its real objective, the destruction of marriage and the family, by perverting marriage in the Supreme Court’s Obergfell decision which is being interpreted as establishing the federal stance that same-sex unions may be called marriages, with all the accompanying legal benefits that attach to the legal state of marriage.

In the service of an agenda to normalize many forms of deviant sexual behavior, secular activists inside and outside of the federal bureaucracy have pressed to incorporate exposure and desensitization to deviant sexual behavior into the public school’s Common Core regulations, including a plan to teach about all sorts of sex acts to young children beginning in kindergarten. They also advocate for special treatment of sexual deviants in the workplace. Apparently they have won their advocacy for tolerance of deviant sexuality on military bases.

It is not hard to see how a government that is so pleased to promote varieties of sexual expression which used to be considered criminal acts in the USA would now propose to hold up SFC Martland as the criminal rather than the man who abused a child. SFC Martland confronted the accused man and reported the accusation to him. The man laughed. “He’s just a child!” he said. SFC Martland did not find that attitude amusing, and he immediately expelled the Afghan man from the military base. People who believe that it is a crime for a man to use a boy as a sex toy will agree with SFC Martland, but the federal government sees it quite differently. At the moment, SFC Martland’s fate is not sealed, but the time is growing short. Unless someone high in the military, or perhaps the president himself, acts to reverse the decision handed down in the actions against SFC Martland, he will be given a dishonorable discharge. A nation who should be thanking him for standing strong for what is right will instead dismiss him and cut him off from any benefit, pension, or honor for his faithful service.

SFC Martland is not the only person in the military who suffers from the degradation of morality within our federal government and our culture. Anyone who has a grain of common sense and who has not poured concrete over the moral standard God wrote on his heart at birth knows that little boys are not created by God to be sexual surrogates for the pleasure of grown men. Any US citizen who reads the military record of a man like SFC Martland knows that this man acts with honor and integrity in all his military assignments, and his action against the Aghan abuser would be praised by secular thinkers if the Afghan man were instead a white man abusing a small black boy. If that were the scene, then secularists would call the white man a bully and the black boy a victim, and they would march through the streets shouting “Black Lives Matter.” Instead, they scorn the anguish of a little Afghan boy and his mother, and act as if they are saving the world for homosexuals by giving SFC Martland a dishonorable discharge.

Christians need to know that this sort of thing is taking place in the government and its most powerful bureaucracy, the military. Christians mourn the degradation of public morality that is destroying our culture. The themes of sexual orientation, gender identity, redefining marriage, allowing same-sex couples to adopt children, and many other agenda items being promoted by social activism are so numerous and the clamor for change is so mind-bending that it is hard to know where to turn. What should a Christian do?

A Christian should not simply sit silent and wish things were different. There is a lot we can do, and we should be doing all these things. Each person must listen to the Holy Spirit for guidance before taking any action, but if you believe that Jesus did say we should be salt and light in the culture, you know that we should not allow such things to happen without resisting them. What can we do?

• We can and we must pray for God’s guidance. We must ask God to show us how to speak and what to say and what to do
• We can write to our representatives and senators in Congress
• We can sign petitions such as the ones often promoted by legal groups such as the American Center for Law and Justice, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Thomas More Law Center. These legal foundations work tirelessly and charge no fees for their service to people such as SFC Martland when justice requires a defense against the monstrous federal government
• We must put our hope in God and trust that what he does is always right and in keeping with his heavenly purposes. God rescued the three Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, yet God allowed Stephen to die a cruel death by stoning. God’s purposes are not always served by serving our convenience.
• We must look at the situation from God’s perspective and recognize that our concerns are likely only small streams in the larger scene and the tides of history that God is directing to his ultimate victory over evil.
• We must nurture our faith with daily prayer and Bible study.
• We must forgive the very people we know are doing wrong for all that they do to hurt us and our country. We must pray God’s blessing on them and pray fervently for them to receive Christ and his salvation. God loves the Afghan man who abused that small boy on the military base, even as God is angered and grieved by that behavior. Without condoning that behavior, without failing to act for the improvement of government administration and without giving up on the possibility of a just outcome for SFC Martland, we nevertheless pray for the salvation of all, because Christ died for the whole world, not just for us.

SFC Martland’s current situation is a travesty of justice. He did what people are supposed to do to a bully. May God grant a reversal of injustice and bring about peace and blessing for all involved, according to his perfect wisdom and love.

By Katherine Harms, author of Oceans of Love available for Kindle at Amazon.com. Watch for the release of Thrive! Live Christian in a Hostile World, planned for release in the winter of 2016