The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

All of a sudden I’m feeling an unquenched desire to start practicing Yoga.

Why?

Maybe because I just heard that the conservative, Christian Republicans in the Alabama legislature are dead set on keeping it banned from public schools.

If they don’t like it, it must be good.

They claim school kids who do stretching exercises might wake up and find themselves to be Hindus, God forbid.

We can’t have that, now can we?

Not in a state where politicians are always trying to find ways around the United States Constitution and the Supreme Court to post the Ten Commandments in schools.

Legislating Christianity is fine, but removing a government mandated ban on stretching exercises would be a sin.

These are the same politicians who claim at election time to be fiercely libertarian, that is against any government legislating individual behaviors. They want government out of the bedroom, by God.

But it’s fine to be all in gym class, making sure every exercise is a Christian exercise, I guess.

These same politicians claim they would fight to the death to keep assault rifles in the hands of right-wing crazies, and fight any effort of state governments or the federal government to regulate guns.

But by god we can’t have our kids doing stretching exercises called Yoga. That might corrupt their minds and turn them against the violent Christian sport of football for Christ’s sake.

This all started back in 1993 when the Alabama Board of Education voted to prohibit school personnel from “using any techniques that involve the induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, meditation or yoga.”

Note the specific wording of the government legislating individual behavior. Not exactly a libertarian concept.

Jeremy Gray of Opelika, a Democrat and a member of the House, found out about this on a school visit and has been trying since 2019 to get the ban revoked. He sponsored a bill that recently passed the House, that even says that “all instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises and stretching techniques” and that all techniques “shall have exclusively English descriptive names” — presumably to prevent kids from spontaneously combusting and practicing Hinduism — but it is stalled in the Senate.

Pressure to keep the ban on is coming from such esteemed right-wing nutjob alt-facts groups as the Eagle Forum and former judge Roy Moore’s Foundation for Moral Law.

Gray’s bill would simply allow school systems to offer yoga as an elective activity.

But we can’t have that in Alabama, even though many college and professional football coaches now use yoga to help athletes gain more flexibility.

Forget the ban on yoga, y’all.

If I was back in Alabama and a member of the legislature, I would be advocating a bill to ban hypocrisy from the state.

But it seems hypocrisy is a written requirement to be a member of the Republican Party or the Christian faith these days.

No wonder church membership in the U.S. is falling and people are leaving the Republican Party in droves.

Did we miss a story somewhere on a new dictum being passed by the Southern Baptist Convention making hypocrisy a requirement for preachers and politicians?

Maybe it’s time for a chant-in down in Montgomery.

Where is my yoga mat?

Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti…