Voice for 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.

On February 25, 2004, Lama Surya Das announced his support for the marriage equality movement in San Francisco and his hopes that the state of California and the city of San Francisco would take firm action to protect the civil rights of gay citizens and their families:

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. 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. [Link]

Freedom to Marry salutes Lama Surya Das as a Voice for Equality!

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