Yoga in public schools — an Establishment Clause problem.

NPR has trouble seeing the objection. This kids are stretching, readying their minds for learning, don't you know? But here's one mother's report:

"They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercise"...

The woman, Mary Eady, was able to take her son out of the classes — which is an appropriate accommodation but insufficient to solve an Establishment Clause violation. (In the old prayer-in-school cases, excusing the students who chose not to pray did not suffice.)

The school's program was richly funded by the K.P. Jois Foundation, whose Hindu founders connected yoga to their religion.

"It's stated in the curriculum that it's meant to shape the way that they view the world, it's meant to shape the way that they make life decisions," Eady says. "It's meant to shape the way that they regulate their emotions and the way that they view themselves."

"And then the question becomes — if it is religious, which it is, who decides when enough religion has been stripped out of the program to make it legal?" [says Dean Broyles, president and chief counsel of the Escondido-based National Center for Law and Policy]. "I mean, that's the problem when you introduce religion into the curriculum and actually immerse and marinate children in the program."...

"It is the stated goal of both the Jois Foundation and the district itself to prove scientifically that Ashtanga yoga works for kids here in the district and then export it nationally," Broyles says.

The Jois Foundation has a director, Eugene Ruffin, who is himself Catholic and who says the values taught in the program aren't specifically Hindu. But making religion generic doesn't solve your problem. Consult the original Warren Court school-prayer case, Engel v. Vitale, which involved a prayer concocted by the state that stripped out all denominational specificity.

My position — explained here in the context of Kwanzaa — is that the government should not use schools for exercises that reach into the spiritual aspect of the child's mind. Quite aside from whether courts would see an Establishment Clause violation, it should be rejected as a policy choice. Even where you have trouble deciding whether something is religion or not, if it's a religion substitute, operating like religion, you should be revolted by the government intruding into the sphere that belongs to the individual, parents, and private organizations. And on this ground, I would object to all sorts of indoctrination and idol-worship. Public schools must be committed to teaching real substance of the secular kind. Think: math and science.

ADDED: Imagine if a Christian foundation were handing out huge grants to public schools to adopt a program based on its values, with generic prayer-like incantations led by the teacher. Would NPR and its devotees be nodding calmly at how nice it was?

ALSO: NPR quotes the mother's attempt at paraphrasing the prayer-like incantation. I'd like to see the actual text that the school uses! Here's some material at the Jois website, but it doesn't show the text I'm looking for.

Oxford University Press bows to pressure from religionists...

... who were offended by an essay that said something wrong about Rama.

The press was sued in India over distribution of the essay and -- according to court documents cited in the letter sent to the press Monday and to Indian press reports -- apologized for having distributed the essay. Oxford press officials were quoted as telling the court hearing the suit: "Our client further wish to assure your client that as publishers of long standing and repute, it has been their conscious endeavour to respect the plurality of Indian culture in all publishing activities which they undertake and very much regret that the essay in question has inadvertently caused your client distress and concern."

"I was dabbling in witchcraft, I've dabbled in Buddhism."

"I would have become a Hare Krishna but I didn't want to become a vegetarian and that is honestly the reason why because I'm Italian, I love meatballs."

"Suicide is generally considered taboo in Hinduism, the religion of most Indians, because it disrupts the cycle of reincarnation that is central to the soul’s progress...."

"But the willingness to die for a cause, as exemplified by Gandhi’s epic fasts during the struggle for independence, is seen as noble and worthy. Ancient warriors in Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India, would commit suicide if their commander was killed.... And the practice of sati, or widow burning, although outlawed, remains a potent symbol of wifely devotion."

A 2-year-old boy has been "married" to a dog to ward off the evil signified by a defective tooth.

"The 'bride's' father, Parakrama Munda, said: 'This is just a ceremony to please the tribal deity - in the great epic Mahabharat a dog helped the Pandavas reach heaven.'"

"Don't worry, it won't smell like urine and will be tasty too."

Quaff some "gau jal" — "cow water" — the drink made from cow urine:

The drink is the latest attempt by [the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India's biggest and oldest Hindu nationalist group] – to cleanse India of foreign influence and promote its ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness.

Hindus revere cows and slaughtering them is illegal in most of India. Cow dung is traditionally used as a fuel and disinfectant in villages, while cow urine and dung are often consumed in rituals to "purify" those on the bottom rungs of the Hindu caste system.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots... began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

I don't mean to be culturally insensitive, but... ew. And to be a little bit positive, I do see how it might help with obesity.

IN THE COMMENTS: Apparently, if you must talk about the stimulus package, this thread is the appropriate place to gush forth.

Cockroach Christmas.

Our favorite insect, blogging cockroach, skittered through the Red Clock Café a few minutes ago:

hi professor
sorry i haven t been around much
tommy s computer was broken
tommy is the boy whose computer i use
anyway computer trouble was only for starters
grand mere showed up from france
you know mom here at the house is french
well the very formidable grand mere blew in
complaining about everything americain
but grand mere took a spill in this fancy
cambridge food store that tries its best
so much to be french that julia child used
to shop there anyway grand mere is in hospital
and won t be out until christmas quel dommage

then we ve had snow snow snow and 2 out of 3
of tommy s christmas concerts were cancelled
that make money for his school quel dommage
which is actually a choir school where they sing
in latin if you want for weddings and funerals
quis a misericordia

well this is the first year everybody didn t
go to france for christmas er noel
so i was looking forward to grand mere s
french christmas cooking because if she s
anything like mom she s real sloppy
which is the first thing i look for in a cook

usually it s real quiet here during christmas
and i have a chance to meditate
on my having the transmigrated soul
of a composer and music professor
which is a little odd to be able to
remember but maybe i didn t get my
dose of the soup of forgetfulness
which proves that the cosmic cook
was probably a little too neat in my case

i have to admit that being a cockroach near harvard u
is pretty good comeuppance for a reborn
asshole prof at a 3rd rate state u
maybe it was 2nd rate but don t make me
a worm next time for bragging
you know i only wanted to get by last time
and what better way than cooking up
academic crap music that was only trendy
at 3rd rate state u s where the deans thought
they were being so avant garde
while they really were wearing no clothes
and no one would tell them
but at least i could hit on grad students
with nice legs
they had to have nice legs
and we got to the no clothes part asap
but now look at me
i ve got lots of legs these days

anyway i use this time to contemplate
how i got here and have resolved to be
a better sentient being if even an insect this time
because i now have an inkling of how
you can blow it if you re a jerk or even
if you re wasting your talents on useless crap
which i now think is a sure path to
invertebratedom in the next life

but this is all so hard to figure out and
it doesn t help that i only have 960 brain cells
although you would be surprised that
consciousness has less to do with the
hardware than you might imagine
so think about that the next time
you squash a cockroach
merry christmas

IN THE COMMENTS: Sir Archy -- our "Ghost of a Gentleman dead these 260 Years and more" -- stops by, with a response on the subject of reincarnation:

I may tell you that upon my Death I had expect'd to be sent to Heaven, or, Hell, or, perhaps, to have been Transmigrat'd into some other sentient Being, as the Hindoos teach and you have experienc'd. You may imagine my Mortification at finding myself remaining a disembody'd Spirit all these Years. I should have been happy even to have been plac'd in the Body of a miserable Cockroach, such as yourself. I endeavour'd, as much as any Sinner, to live a virtuous Life, and have thus always regarded my disembody'd Existence a most unfair Sentence; but, our Situations shew how hard 'tis to comprehend the Will of GOD, or, as some would have it, the Workings of the Universe. In this, the teachings of my Calvinistick Religion would seem to be vindicated; yet, as a Ghost, I may tell you that the Doctrines of neither Geneva, nor, Rome, nor, Benares, nor even, Lahsa are adequate to the Matter....

But this post is already long, so I must send you inside to read the rest.

"Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay."

Wrote Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh, Christopher Hitchens tells us:

[H]e was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it—after a Hindu goddess—Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta's work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay's hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")

Andrew Sullivan resolves to write "Bombay" from now on.

I'll change my "Mumbai" tag to "Bombay." (My "Burma" tag was always "Burma.")

ADDED: From Hitchens's book "God Is Not Great":

Bombay... used to be considered a pearl of the Orient, with its necklace of lights along the corniche and its magnificent British Raj architecture. It was one of India's most diverse and plural cities, and its many layers of texture have been cleverly explored by Salman Rushdie... and in the films of Mira Nair. It is true that there had been intercommunal fighting there, during the time in 1947-1948 when the grand historic movement for an Indian self-government was being ruined by Muslim demands for a separate state and by the fact that the Congress Party was led by a pious Hindu. But probably as many people took refuge in Bombay during that moment of religious bloodlust as were driven or fled from it. A form of cultural coexistence resumed, as often happens when cities are exposed to the sea and to influences from outside. Parsis -- former Zoroastrians who had been persecuted in Persia -- were a prominent minority, and the city was also host to a historically significant community of Jews. But that was not enough to content Mr. Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena Hindu nationalist movement, who in the 1990s decided that Bombay should be run by and for his coreligionists, and who loosed a tide of goons and thugs onto the streets. Just to show he could do it, he ordered the city renamed as "Mumbai"....