Muggles are the cwaziest people, as Elmer Fudd might say if he could ever get the hat with the earflaps off and forget about wabbits.

Elmer meet Harry (Daniel Radcliffe, at right), in a just released still from the upcoming summer release Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix .

As the quite teenaged Harry demonstrates, every boy has a magic wand in Potterville — but we’ve already gone on at rococo lengths about the nude cheek of stage actor Daniel.

Harry knows all about knuckleheaded Muggles and their small-minded ass-backward Dursley ways. He would not be surprised — as neither were we — to read a story that appeared today in the Washington Post:

Pentecostal chaplain in the Army has a crisis of faith, switches to Wiccan and is booted out of the military.

Is this a wonderful country or what?

Can “they” not help but hate us for our freedom? As our President said recently in an unscripted and surely unintentionally accurate moment. “We are a diverse nation — all religions are worshiped here.”

Excerpt from the much longer (5 web pages) story in the Washington Post:

A year ago, Don Larsen was a Pentecostal Christian minister at Camp Anaconda, the largest U.S. support base in Iraq. He sent home reports on the number of “decisions” — soldiers committing their lives to Christ — that he inspired in the base’s Freedom Chapel.

But inwardly, he says, he was torn between Christianity’s exclusive claims about salvation and a “universalist streak” in his thinking. The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which collapsed the dome of a 1,200-year-old holy site and triggered a widening spiral of revenge attacks between Shiite and Sunni militants, prompted a decision of his own.

“I realized so many innocent people are dying again in the name of God,” Larsen says. “When you think back over the Catholic-Protestant conflict, how the Jews have suffered, how some Christians justified slavery, the Crusades, and now the fighting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, I just decided I’m done. . . . I will not be part of any church that unleashes its clergy to preach that particular individuals or faith groups are damned.”

Larsen’s private crisis of faith might have remained just that, but for one other fateful choice. He decided the religion that best matched his universalist vision was Wicca, a blend of witchcraft, feminism and nature worship that has ancient pagan roots.

On July 6, he applied to become the first Wiccan chaplain in the U.S. armed forces, setting off an extraordinary chain of events. By year’s end, his superiors not only denied his request but also withdrew him from Iraq and removed him from the chaplain corps, despite an unblemished service record.

Adherents of Wicca, one of the nation’s fastest-growing religions, contend that Larsen is a victim of unconstitutional discrimination. They say that Wicca, though recognized as a religion by federal courts and the Internal Revenue Service, is often falsely equated with devil worship.

“Institutionalized bigotry and discriminatory actions . . . have crossed the line this time,” says David L. Oringderff, a retired Army intelligence officer who is an elder in the Sacred Well Congregation, the Texas-based Wiccan group that Larsen joined.

Larsen, 44, blames only himself. He said he was naive to think he could switch from Pentecostalism to Wicca in the same way that chaplains routinely change from one Christian denomination to another.

Chaplain Kevin L. McGhee, Larsen’s superior at Camp Anaconda, believes a “grave injustice” was done. McGhee, a Methodist, supervised 26 chaplains on the giant base near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. He says Larsen was the best.

“I could go on and on about how well he preached, the care he gave,” McGhee says. “What happened to Chaplain Larsen — to be honest, I think it’s political. A lot of people think Wiccans are un-American, because they are ignorant about what Wiccans do.”

What Larsen does is eclectic, to say the least. … Raised as a Catholic, he became a born-again Christian at a Billy Graham crusade and began preaching at a Baptist church in Garrison, Mont., while still in high school. … In church, he spoke in tongues. In private, he read heavily in Buddhism.

He learned about Wicca, ironically, from the Army, in an overview of various faiths at the Chaplain’s Basic Training Course at Fort Jackson, S.C., in 2005.

Sporting a military high-top haircut and Converse high-top sneakers, Larsen appears closer to 24 than 44, and it is easy to see why he was popular with the troops. Earnest without appearing pious, he tears up when he describes a chaplain’s duty to ensure the dignified handling of soldiers’ remains.

In a single sentence, he links Native American sweat lodges, Saint Francis of Assisi and the Hindu leader Amma — the common thread being his reverence for each. When he mentions the late Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, he quickly adds the traditional honorific “of blessed memory.”

He cites Dr. Seuss as readily as the Bible. …

He says he understands why strangers might think “a mortar round must have landed too close to this guy.” He recalls, with a chuckle, that a friend once gave him a diagnosis of “multiple religions disorder” …

“In Iraq, I saw what was happening in the name of Allah and I thought, ‘This has got to stop.’ . . . The common core of all religions, we’re saying the same stuff,” he says. “I just decided that the rest of my life I will encourage people to seek out the light however they see fit, through the Bhagavad-Gita, the Torah, the writings of prophets and sages — whatever path propels them to be good and honorable and upright.”

The article concludes:

When a Texas newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, reported in 1999 that a circle of Wiccans was meeting regularly at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, then-Gov. George W. Bush told ABC’s Good Morning America: “I don’t think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it.”

Eight years later, the circle at Lackland is still going strong, and the military permits Wiccans to worship on U.S. bases around the world. But when Sgt. Patrick D. Stewart was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2005, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs refused to allow a Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, to be inscribed on his memorial at the Fernley, Nev., veterans’ cemetery. Ultimately, Nevada officials approved the pentacle anyway.

Right. So all religions are “worshiped” here, but some are more worshiped them others. Oink, oink.

In a related story, Voldemort is back — big time, baby!