SAN DIEGO — Marine Sgt. Gary Stein started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free-speech rights. Then he declared that he wouldn’t follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama.
While Stein softened his statement to say he wouldn’t follow “unlawful orders,” military observers say he may have gone too far.
The Marine Corps is now looking into whether he violated the military’s rules prohibiting political statements by those in uniform and broke its guidelines on what troops can and cannot say on social media. Stein said his views are constitutionally protected.
While troops have always expressed their views in private, Stein’s case highlights the potential for their opinions to go global as tech-savvy service members post personal details, videos and pictures.
“I think that it’s been pretty well established for a long time that freedom of speech is one area in which people do surrender some of their basic rights in entering the armed forces,” said former Navy officer David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Stein said his statement was part of an online debate about NATO allowing U.S. troops to be tried for the Koran burnings in Afghanistan.
In that context, he said, he was stating that he would not follow orders from the president if those orders included detaining U.S. citizens, disarming them or doing anything else that he believes would violate their constitutional rights.
