The Film Anti-Religion Dems Should See

FOUR days before the election, Mel Gibson’s new movie — “Hacksaw Ridge” — is going to hit the screens. It’s about Private Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to carry a weapon but went into the Battle of Okinawa as a medic. And won the Medal of Honor. What an example Doss is for a country that is about to go to the polls in an election in which one of the issues is religious freedom. How does our country accommodate those who have deeply held views that conflict with our laws?

God may be neither a Democrat nor a Republican. But it’s hard for us mortals to avoid concluding that the two parties hold opposite views on how — or whether — to accommodate religious dissenters in 21stcentury America.

This burst back into the headlines with the latest e-mails showing that Hillary Clinton’s campaign camarilla takes a dim view of religion. One complained that the chairman of The Post — “Friggin’ Murdoch” — had his children baptized in the Jordan.

That language is from John Halpin of the Center for American “Progress.” In an email to Clinton’s campaign chairman he complains that “many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts).”

Halpin even carps about Catholics on the Supreme Court (so much for the Constitution’s prohibition on religious tests for public office). And worries about conservative Catholics showing up in think tanks, the media and “social groups.”

Such conservatives, Halpin speculates, are attracted to Catholicism’s “systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.” One can only imagine what he thinks of Orthodox Jews or Muslims.

The e-mails, of course, are anecdotal. So the other day I asked two of America’s leading advocates for religious liberty to estimate the number of religious-freedom cases in our courts.

They guessed the answer is: between 200 and 1,000. Maybe more with all the cases involving prisoners and land-use issues.

Yet it’s hard to think of a major case in which the Democrats are on the side of the religious party. I doubt Hillary Clinton or her party has spoken up for a single religious litigant.

Not for the Little Sisters of the Poor, who have several times gone to the Supreme Court to escape ObamaCare’s birth-control mandate. Nor for the Satmar Hasidim, who require modest dress in their stores in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Nor did Clinton put in a word for the clerk of Rowan County, Ky., Kim Davis. She had sought a religious accommodation to excuse her from signing a marriage license for a same-sex couple.

God only knows what Clinton would have done had she been the commanding officer of the 77th Infantry Division. That was the one in which Doss went into the Battle of Okinawa.

Mel Gibson’s movie shows Doss wrestling with his beliefs. “I can’t stay here while all them go fight for me,” he declares, deciding that he’d try saving lives while others were taking them.

“I don’t know how I could live with myself if I don’t stay true to what I believe,” he tells his sweetheart. Bullies in his unit test him, but the Army, after a formal hearing, finally accommodates him.

“Private Doss,” a colonel informs him, “you are free to run into the hellfire of battle without a single weapon to protect yourself.”

That’s what he was doing in May 1945 on Okinawa, where, on what President Truman would later call a “jagged escarpment,” glory found him. Our troops were gaining the summit when they were hit with artillery, mortar and machine gun fire.

The citation Truman later issued says that Doss carried “all 75 casualties one by one to the edge of the escarpment.” Then he lowered them “on a rope-supported litter” down the face of the cliff.

When he himself was shot, he splinted his own arm using a rifle stock. Truman wrote that throughout the 77th Infantry Division, Doss’ name became a symbol of gallantry. And, for our time, a symbol of the wisdom of religious accommodation.

Including for us New Yorkers, among whom the 77th Infantry was originally raised. When Doss was draped with America’s highest award for valor, he was wearing the 77th’s famous shoulder patch — the Statue of Liberty.