While the weaponry of our armed forces has become more lethal and technologically advanced with breathtaking rapidity, it has always managed to hang onto its trusty double-edged sword.

The military, with a self-righteous and haughty harrumph, professes to be founded and maintained to preserve liberty, yet it is traditionally stingy when it comes to doling out liberty to its own people and even private citizens.

The Founding Fathers were at war over their insistence that the laws of the British sovereign were tyrannical while some of them simultaneously engaged in the buying and selling of human beings.

It wasn't until President Truman signed a bill making desegregation mandatory in the Armed Services that there was any semblance of equal treatment of blacks in the military. That it became illegal did not end bigotry any more than the Emancipation Proclamation had stopped bigotry across America. But at least we had it written on a piece of paper that biased actions against our brothers and sisters is wrong. Some time it may eventually be written in our hearts.

The shameful treatment by the military of homosexual men and women makes the boast that America is dedicated to freedom a tad difficult to swallow. The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" solution embraced by leaders of both major parties to deal with allowing gays to serve in the military in the past decade results in a military force whose leaders serve under a banner that embraces duplicity and is clearly prejudicial.

The Defense Department discharged 726 service members last year for the high crime of being homosexual while gays serve gallantly without persecution in the armed forces of many of our closest allies -- among them the United Kingdom, Australia and Israel.

Now we have at issue further evidence of bias in a blank space in a wall of brass plaques for local heroes in the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Fernley, Nev. The memorial for Sgt. Patrick Steward is missing because he was a Wiccan. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has refused to let the pentacle, a five-pointed star within a circle, be inscribed on U.S. military memorials or grave markers.

Stewart, 34, was killed when the helicopter in which he was riding was shot down in Afghanistan last year. He was also a veteran of the Gulf War, in 1991. The directors of the veterans' cemetery in Fernley said that they would install the plaque without the pentacle. Roberta Stewart, Sergeant Stewart's widow, said, "No thanks."

The Veterans Administration has compiled a list of 38 "emblems of belief" approved for government headstones and memorials. Wicca has not made the list. What the nation for which Sergeant Stewart died should do is let the relatives of men and women killed in action be completely free to choose religious symbols that they find acceptable and are in no way offensive to the general populace.

Whom in the military would you trust to be impartial and fair in compiling such a list anyway? The government track record in recognizing or administering those virtues is a sorry one at best. Are we so bereft of nobility, dignity and decency that we can't give fundamental freedoms to the families of military men and women who died to preserve all our freedoms?

A vacant spot in a small-town cemetery in Middle America cries out a shameful answer.

-- Bernard F. Sullivan