{"id":14092,"date":"2015-03-08T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/03\/08\/hindu-prayer-opens-idaho-state-senate-session-amid-protest\/"},"modified":"2015-03-08T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T12:00:00","slug":"hindu-prayer-opens-idaho-state-senate-session-amid-protest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/03\/08\/hindu-prayer-opens-idaho-state-senate-session-amid-protest\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindu Prayer Opens Idaho State Senate Session Amid Protest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

UNITED STATES, March 6, 2015 (The Hindu): For the first time the opening prayer for the Idaho state senate was said on Tuesday by a Hindu cleric amid protests by some senators who claimed the United States was a Christian nation and denounced Hinduism, local media reported.<\/p>\n

Rajan Zed, who said the prayer in Sanskrit and English, made a call for the legislators to “act selflessly without any thought of personal profit” because “selfish action imprisons the world.” He was invited by Senate President Pro-Tem Brent Hill to be a guest chaplain and deliver the invocation which is usually made by a Christian chaplain at the start of the day’s legislative session in Boise. According to The Idaho Statesman, when protests were made before the session, Mr. Hill said: “I reviewed the prayer. It did not seem offensive in any way.” He added: “It refers to ‘Deity Supreme’.”<\/p>\n

Senator Steve Vick, who walked out of the Senate chamber before Mr. Zed’s invocation, said that Hindu prayers should not be allowed because the U.S. was “built on the Judeo-Christian, not only religion, but work ethic, and I don’t want to see that undermined”, the Statesman reported. Hindus “have a caste system,” he added. “They worship cows.”<\/p>\n

He was one of the three Republican senators to boycott the prayer. Senator Sheryl Nuxoll said she boycotted Mr. Zed’s prayer because she believed the United States is a Christian nation and “Hindu is a false faith with false gods,” according to the newspaper.<\/p>\n

But Mr. Hill, who is also a Republican, told the Statesman, “In my mind, you either believe in religious freedom or you don’t… We have had Jewish prayers, many denominations of Christian prayers.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source UNITED STATES, March 6, 2015 (The Hindu): For the first time the opening prayer for the Idaho state senate,…<\/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-14092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14092","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=14092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}