Voices of Equality: Lama Surya Das
Lama Surya Das is the most senior Buddhist leader in the United States. Surya has spent thirty five years studying Zen, vipassana, yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with the great masters of Asia, including the Dalai Lama's own teachers, and has twice completed the traditional three year meditation retreat at his teacher's Tibetan monastery. He is an authorized lama (priest and spiritual master teacher) in the Nyingmapa School of Tibetan Buddhism.
He is the founder of the Dzogchen Center and Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its branch centers in New York City, New Jersey, California, Portland, and Texas. Founder of the Western Buddhist Teachers Network with the Dalai Lama, he is also active in interfaith dialogue and social activism and regularly organizes its international Buddhist Teachers Conferences.
QUOTE
"What we're seeing is a religious majority that is trying to take legal rights away from a sexual minority that their religion purportedly doesn't like," Lama Surya Das says. "But our nation's laws have always tried to prevent this kind of tyranny of the majority over the minority."
"The idea that we live in a country where a majority can vote on which legal rights they think a minority 'should' have and which rights they 'shouldn't' is a frightening one. It entirely contradicts what we teach schoolchildren every day in our grade schools, middle schools and high schools."
Read Lama Surya Das' full statement on leaving America's Eastern religions out of the marriage equality debate: Earth to New York Times: "We Live Here Too"
ON THE WEB
PUBLICATIONS
Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be: Lessons on Loss, Change, and Spiritual Transformation (Broadway Books)
The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries (RodaleBooks)
Buddha Is as Buddha Does: The Ten Original Practices for Enlightened Living ( HarperSanFrancisco)
Why Marriage Matters America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry.
By Evan Wolfson
Read reviews! Purchase the book or receive a signed copy as a thank you for your donation!
Read families’ stories about how marriage discrimination affects everyday life. These stories communicate, in concrete ways, how the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage hurts families and helps no one.
Start in The Marriage Basics to get short answers to your big questions about the freedom to marry, and learn more about the protections and responsibilities of marriage, the historical background for this civil rights movement, why separate is not equal, and so much more.
