According to Nanette Spina, assistant professor of religion at the University of Georgia, the yoga most Westerners are familiar with is a category of yoga called hatha yoga. Yoga is much more than downward dog poses, yoga pants and anything that appeared in box office flop, “The Love Guru.” It is a spiritual tradition that goes back thousands of years, and it’s one of the most important concepts to the Hindu faith. An estimated 36.7 million Americans participated in some form of yoga in 2016, but most likely the yoga they partook in doesn’t resemble yoga’s origins or spiritual roots at all. Follow her on Twitter is a $16.8 billion industry in the United States alone. and Atlanta- have appointed liaisons to the LGBT community.
Now, major cities across the country– such as Dallas, Cincinnati, Boise, New York City, Washington D.C. Elliot Blackstone was the first LGBT liaison in the United States, appointed to the San Francisco Police Department in 1962. The establishment of LGBT-centric outreach departments within police programs began after the riots and raids of gay bars in the 1960s. As of 2012, the department had investigated 460 cases. In 2000, no cases of same-sex intimate partner violence had been reported. Additionally, the GLLU has been credited with raising awareness of same-sex intimate partner violence in the city. In the year following the appointment of LGBT liaison officers, the reporting of hate crimes against LGBT people in Washington, D.C. Police abuse, neglect and misconduct were consistently reported at higher frequencies by respondents of color and transgender and gender nonconforming respondents.Ī 2015 Williams Institute study found that establishing a culture of acceptance in the police force and the surrounding community is likely to improve policing and increase overall safety.įor example, Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department created a Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit in response to several incidents of police harassment against LGBT people in the late 90s, and a growing concern that hate crimes against LGBT people were underreported in the city.