Religion Dispatches
…ga guru Baba Ramdev for having made major advances in popularizing yoga in India. (Recently, Ramdev has made the outrageous claim that yoga can cure homosexuality—he also supports the Indian government’s ongoing criminalization of sex between consenting adults of the same sex—as well as the far-reaching claim that it could cure cancer.) Modi’s recent efforts to reclaim yoga for India are just one part of a much larger public movement to define yog…
Read More…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…
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…give our people a future of prosperity and security the United States and India stand united.” He went on to praise the people of Mumbai, evoking Gandhi and particularly noting that the strength of India—like the strength of the USA—lies in diversity, which was on full display during those attacks when we saw “Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, protecting each other, saving each other, living the common truth of all the world’s great r…
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…executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, who regularly travels to India for nonviolence trainings. In India, “their action is a little bit more spontaneous.” A New Revolution The March 10 National Uprising Day protest in Delhi was bigger than ever this year. Tempa Tsering, the official representative of the Dalai Lama, says more than 1,000 gathered in front of the United Nations’ office to mark the anniversary of the 1959 rebellion in Tib…
Read More…re at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. Sharm, described by the CBC as an “Indian-born, New York-based, openly gay Muslim,” secretly videotaped his journey to Mecca on his iPhone and other small phones. “I was terrified because they reserve the death penalty for people like me,” Sharma said. Several times he had his equipment seized and video files deleted by authorities. But he persevered with both his spiritual journey and his film. “I was there…
Read More…into force on 22 April,” the International Law Professor Blog reports. The new penal code has been condemned by the United Nations. England: Priest Defies Church Ban to Marry His Partner; University Bans Anti-Gay Muslim Speakers Last week Rev. Jeremy Pemberton, a priest with the Church of England, married his partner Laurence Cunnington in defiance of church rules forbidding clergy from even blessing same-sex unions. The head of the conservative…
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…There were fliers portraying President of the current opposition party in India, the Indian National Congress party, Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton as horned demons on a “witch hunt” to “get Modi” and his party for alleged involvement in the 2002 riots in Gujarat. Modi governed the state during the violence that took the lives of more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. In stark contrast, there were large posters displaying Trump in what a…
Read More…d ironical that India would use a colonial law to oppress its homosexuals. India needs to grow up. India needs to realise that it doesn’t need to follow British laws any more.” The actor is referring to India’s Section 377, a gay sex ban which was introduced in 1862 under British rule. The colonial-era law was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 2013. The law criminalises sexual activity “against the order of nature” and can result in a maximum lif…
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…al and economic rewards it claims to offer. The economic prosperity of the Indian-American community, coupled with the geopolitical space India is being placed in, and the economic fruits that it invitingly dangles, will only accelerate these desires—offering not just the ‘wages of Whiteness’ but the ‘wages of empire’ too. For Ramaswamy, this has involved a remarkable contortion to force Hinduism into a form familiar to White nationalists: as simp…
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…the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members. And since this sham of an “ethics code” was published, even more details on the corruption at the highest court of the land have come to light, with ProPublica reporting that Clarence Thomas was threatening to retire in order to move GOP politicians to lobby for higher wages for SCOTUS justices. In 2024, we will also find out how the Supreme Court reac…
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