Now Fundies Want to Go After All Those Practicing YOGA!

Where does it end? What drives these hyper-Christian freaks? (E.g. The Pastor Mike clones who propose things like 'national registries' for atheists). The latest target is Yoga! Put in the same category as Eckanckar  - which my niece Vanessa follows- it is claimed by the likes of former Pastor Mike and his clones to be a "Satan-devised teaching" and  "one of the most dangerous practices of giving an opening to demonic forces. " (Jan. 20, Mike's  'Straight Talk'  Blog). Jeebus, one wonders what lil ol' Mikey was drinking? (Hope it's wasn't Miramar Moonshine!)

My nieces, see their images in the March 6 blog, used to do Yoga all the time, following the example of their mom. They enjoyed it, plus meditating on the 'OM' focused their minds, assisted in helping them get through tough times (like the aftermath of the Cubana Airlines bombing and bloody parts washing up on Paradise Beach). While bro Mikey has bragged how he was a Marine and all that (during the 'Nam era) I doubt he saw as much blood and gore as my three nieces and I did that god-awful day in October, 1976. If he did, he's never mentioned it, and if he was on KP duty it's hard to imagine unless he sliced himself with a butcher knife while cutting chicken quarters.

Anyway, fast forward to the present bunch of anti-Yoga nuts. Since October, a group of parents in Encinitas, Calif., have been working with the Encinitas-based National Center for Law and Policy (NCLP) to stop one of the town’s public elementary schools from teaching yoga to its students and thus indoctrinating them in the Hindu faith. Never mind such teaching would solve a lot of problems and enhance student self-esteem and inquiry.


The NCLP is helmed by Dean Broyles, a lawyer who says he was “called to law school specifically to be trained to fight for religious liberties.”

Liberties? How about the liberties of the students to practice Yoga like my nieces?

But look at the source. This bozo apprenticed under Jay Sekulow, head of the Christian-right American Center for Law and Justice, and “received extensive training in pro-family, pro-life and pro-religious liberty matters” from the National Litigation Academies run by the virulently anti-gay Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund).

In other words, the imputation is that yoga (a practice thousands of years old dating to before the birth of Christ) is anti-family, anti-life and anti-liberty. What a bunch of rank codswallop!

Truth be told, it's hard to fathom what these people are bitching over. The cold hard fact is the Encinitas program, like many American adaptations of yoga, has been stripped utterly of any references to prayer and reduced to a strictly physical regimen. Thus there is no sounding of the OM, the holy word of the universe bidding it to unify with oneself. (As my nieces practiced, and which helped them immensely to get past the horrors of the Cubana Airlines attack).


But  that’s not enough for Broyles, who bellows:  “Who decides when enough religion has been stripped out of the program to make it legal?” he asks. “That’s the problem when you introduce religion into the curriculum and actually immerse and marinate children in the program.”

But there is NO religion introduced, you numbnut! It's a purely physical exercise, like Pilates.


Broyles isn't the only far-right Christian hardliner to brood over the potential impact of yoga on vulnerable young minds. Tony Perkins, president of the anti-gay Family Research Council, in January lit into the U.S. military for "promoting the pagan art" among its members.


Perkins, on his stupid radio show referenced a weekly yoga class offered to U.S. Marines as a means of dealing with stress, Perkins lamented that “the military seems intent on driving religion out and replacing it with wacky substitutes. They’ve added atheist chaplains, Wiccan worship centers, and now, meditation classes. But none of them are as effective or as constructive as a personal relationship with God.”

I wouldn't be so bold as to say that! Look, imagine if my deranged brother Mike had had the benefits of Yoga while he was being subjected to all those indignities and humiliations at Parris Island. Chances are he would have emerged with at least some semblance of  good will and tolerance as opposed to ill will, class and race hatred and religious bigotry. To me he lost out though he insists he "saved his soul". All I can ask is: What soul? That  rancid, abhorrent, fulminating excuse for a thing you display every day on your pathetic blog? The one where you portray Obama as everything from a 1-eyed goblin, to a Nazi to an Antichrist? And you display your own kin boiling in fires with their eye balls melting while your image is there laughing at them from "heaven"?

Anyway, let us hope the ACLU and SPLC step in and put the kibosh on this derelict effort to eradicate student choice and health benefits.  As my niece Trudi  (seen in Mar. 6 blog photo on the left) said: "What have those kids got to lose? They have everything to gain!"

I totally agree!