{"id":12466,"date":"2007-07-12T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-12T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2007\/07\/12\/americans-united-for-separation-of-church-and-state-deplore-disruption\/"},"modified":"2007-07-12T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-12T12:00:00","slug":"americans-united-for-separation-of-church-and-state-deplore-disruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2007\/07\/12\/americans-united-for-separation-of-church-and-state-deplore-disruption\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Americans United for Separation of Church and State&#8221; Deplore Disruption"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"source\"><a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news2007\/0712-05.htm\">www.commondreams.org<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"summary\">WASHINGTON, D.C., July 12, 2007: (HPI note: This is a press release.) Americans United for Separation of Church and State today deplored the disruption by Religious Right activists of a Hindu chaplain&#8217;s prayer to open the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This shows the intolerance of many Religious Right activists,&#8221; said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. &#8220;They say they want more religion in the public square, but it&#8217;s clear they mean only their religion.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;America is a land of extraordinary religious diversity, and the Religious Right just can&#8217;t seem to accept that fact,&#8221; Lynn continued. &#8220;I don&#8217;t think the Senate should open with prayers, but if it&#8217;s going to happen, the invocations ought to reflect the diversity of the American people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Religious Right groups have been agitating against the Hindu leader&#8217;s prayer since it was announced. The Rev. Donald Wildmon&#8217;s American Family Association has asked his members to complain to their senators about the invitation. The group&#8217;s news service reported that &#8220;Christian nation&#8221; activist David Barton said that Hinduism has few followers in the United States (HPI note: There are two million Hindus in America) and that prayer to a &#8220;non-monotheistic god&#8221; is &#8220;outside the American paradigm.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Said AU&#8217;s Lynn, &#8220;The Religious Right promotes a deeply skewed version of American history. Our founders wanted separation of church and state and full religious liberty for all faith traditions. The episode today shows we still have a ways to go to achieve that goal.&#8221;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>www.commondreams.org WASHINGTON, D.C., July 12, 2007: (HPI note: This is a press release.) Americans United for Separation of Church and,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}