It doesn't help that the acronym "SA" was once used, in pre-World War Two Germany, to refer to a Nazi paramilitary organization that in 1938 torched almost every synagogue and Jewish-owned business across Germany.

I'm not pushing the point at random. In 2005 Rabbi Eric Yoffie, then-leading the largest branch of American Judaism, told a synagogue audience estimated at 5,000,

"We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations. Yes, we can disagree about gay marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the hellfires of anti-gay bigotry."

To sharpen this even more, consider - in 1922, in the front foyer of the Bavaria headquarters of Hitler's young Nazi Party was a table with pamphlets, written under the name of auto maker Henry Ford, translated into German.

One of the four volumes of Ford's pamphlet series, known as The International Jew (subtitle: "The World's Foremost Problem") contained long lists detailing incidents in an alleged war on Christmas supposedly being waged by American Jews.

Jews with lawyers, emphasized Ford's tract, were shutting down Christmas displays and driving prayer from schools - and, suggested the International Jew, they would do much more - and worse - should they achieve greater influence and power.

In effect, the "war on Christmas", as a political attack meme, was minted by virulent anti-Semites and helped inspire Hitler and the Holocaust.

After World War two, at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, former leader of the Hitler Youth Baldur von Schirach testified that Ford's anti-Jewish tract had played a key role in shaping Shirach's political views.

Let's be clear - the Salvation Army could hardly be more different from Ernst Rohm's SA. Indeed, apart from the common use of uniforms and an emphasis on discipline, there's very little in common between the two, except for this (and, it's a huge exception) - both exemplify radical intolerance (a radical disdain for pluralism), and an ethic of ideological supremacy.

And, both liked to keep tabs on their perceived ideological opponents:

[from 2004 New York ACLU lawsuit filed against the Salvation Army]  

"(Id.¶ 125). Salvation Army leaders conveyed similar anxiety regarding the religious affiliation of human resources staff at SSC. In March of 2003, Colonel Paul Kelly required the Director of Human Resources at the Divisional Headquarters, Maureen Schmidt, to contact SSC's HumanResources Director, plaintiff Margaret Geissman, in order to collect information on the religious affiliation of SSC Human Resources staff. (Id.¶ 126). After Geissman refused to compile the requested information, she was informed by Schmidt that "`they are going to find out about everyone eventually because they want more Christians, especially Salvationists employed at SSC.'" (Id.). Kelly also voiced concern that Geissman might be Jewish, but Schmidt informed him that she was not. (Id.¶ 127).

Schmidt asked Geissman to name the homosexuals working at SSC, but Geissman refused to comply. (Id.¶ 128)."

In the late 1930s, German Jews lost their jobs because of new legislation prohibiting them from working in certain professions. A decade ago in New York City - which boasts the biggest Jewish population outside of Israel, the daughter of a Nobel Prize-winning German-Jewish father - who had fled Hitler's Reich and subsequent Nazi-engineered Holocaust of Europe's Jews - lost her long-time job with the Salvation Army, for refusing to sign what amounted to a loyalty oath, to Salvation Army's Christian supremacist ideology.

As New York City's The Jewish Week reported in a November 11, 2005 story, Wanted: True Believers Only,

"Anne Lown, a Jewish woman from Boston, had worked nearly 25 years for the Salvation Army's children's services arm in New York when she was thrust into the world of faith-based initiatives. Lown, associate director of the local Salvation Army's government-funded Social Services for Children, was one of 18 employees to leave or be dismissed in 2003-04 for allegedly refusing to sign forms swearing loyalty to the group's Christian principles. The employees (among them Jews, Catholics, Evangelical and mainline Protestants, and one ordained Lutheran minister) said they also rejected the army's demands beginning in 2003 for details about what churches they had attended over the past 10 years. They would not permit the army to contact ministers of these churches for information on them. And one manager said she refused a request from her superiors to identify gay workers on her staff. "The whole time I was there no one had asked me about my own religion," said Lown, a soft-spoken woman with a master's degree in social work from Smith College. "There was never any kind of litmus test." Lown's father, Dr. Bernard Lown, won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He had fled Lithuania during World War II to escape the Nazis. Many of her family members, she noted, had died in the Holocaust."

Anne Lown was among a group of former Salvation Army employees who in 2004 filed a lawsuit against the Salvation Army, for the dismissals. Six years later, a legal settlement was reached, as reported in a February 16, 2010 story from the New York Nonprofit Press [also see this ACLU press release]:

"It has been six years since the Salvation Army Greater New York Division's Social Services for Children unit was torn apart by an abrupt change of leadership and charges that the organization was engaging in religious cleansing.   Yesterday, a lawsuit filed by 18 former and current employees against the Salvation Army, as well as the government agencies with which it contracted, was settled -- at least in part.  The Government defendants in the case agreed to a system for monitoring social service organizations receiving government funds to ensure that they do not force people in need of services to engage in religious activities, such as worship or religious instruction. The procedures and standards will also ensure that recipients of social services are not discriminated against because of their religious beliefs."

But the 2010 settlement of the Lown v. Salvation Army case only covered New York State, and the Obama Administration has chosen to not challenge (openly at least) the de-facto regime of government-funded faith-based discrimination now in force across America.

This is no minor issue, either - several billion dollars in federal and state government funding now flows to religious organizations each year, via the federal Faith Based Initiative, neo-voucher funding for religious schools, and other mechanisms - with minimal oversight or regulation.

Thus, the irony could hardly be sharper or more toxic - even as virulently anti-LGBT, religious supremacist neo-fundamentalist nonprofit groups such as Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the American Family Association ramp up their perennial late-Fall clamor about an alleged attack on Christmas and widespread "war" on Christianity, government-funded discrimination in the name of the faith - discrimination against LGBTI citizens, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and other targeted groups -  is in most legal jurisdictions in the United States, now deemed lawful.  

As for the Salvation Army, there's more to be said. In 2008,  I made my first entry in what I had planned as a series covering the spread of New Apostolic Reformation ideas and influence in the Salvation Army.

My story mentioned that NAR prophets Stacey and Wesley Campbell serve on the Board of Reference of the Salvation Army's "War College", which teaches NAR ideology to young SA recruits.

What I had planned to cover in the future was the fact that back in 2002, prior to the SA's purge of gays, Jews, Muslims, and other minorities from the Salvation Army's New York City division, writings from top New Apostolic Reformation leader C. Peter Wagner were published, alongside writing from top Salvation Army leaders, in the SA's publication Journal of Aggressive Christianity.

In effect, top Salvation Army leadership had endorsed Wagner and his recently announced NAR movement - which at the time was even more controversial than now.

The Salvation Army's relationship with Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation is especially problematic given the leading role NAR apostles and prophets have played in creating Uganda's "kill the gays" bill and in inciting anti-LGBT hostility in both America and Uganda.

When Uganda's Anti Homosexuality Bill - created with the help of NAR apostle Julius Oyet (who has been part of the "International Transformation Network" ministry team of C. Peter Wagner's close NAR colleague Ed Silvoso) - was introduced in Uganda's parliament in late 2009, amidst international attention and condemnation, Wagner issued a statement, in Charisma magazine (which at them time was owned and edited by two apostles in the International Coalition of Apostles that Wagner had presided over for most of the decade), criticizing the Anti Homosexuality Bill.

But the most virulently anti-LGBT leaders in Wagner's apostolic and and prophetic associations, including Lou Engle, continued to travel to Uganda and meet with their organizational NAR counterparts who were leading the vanguard of Uganda's mounting war on LGBT rights, and those Ugandan NAR leaders also continued to travel to the United States, to meet with their American (anti-LGBT) NAR colleagues as well.

In effect, Wagner's criticism of the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill appears to have been little more than a public relations stunt and does not seem to have represented any substantial softening of NAR anti-LGBTI eliminationist doctrine or policy.

The same month, in 2009, that C. Peter Wagner had issued his Charisma statement on the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill, Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren - chosen to give a prayer at president Barack Obama's first inauguration in early 2009, issued a globally-distributed press release in which Warren stated that he was not "conspiring" with C. Peter Wagner to "rid the world of homosexuals".  

Wagner, who was Warren's sole adviser for Richard Duane Warren's Doctorate of Ministry dissertation from Fuller Theological Seminary, has identified Rick Warren's "Purpose Driven" ministry efforts, in Africa and elsewhere, as "stage one" of societal "transformation".