Tulsi Gabbard's Connection with Hare Krishna, Gurus, Hinduism

There are a few long articles out there which go into her background. NY Mag and the New Yorker come to mind. Basically she was raised in a Krishna cult whose head guru was an alpha-hippie type with a nasty homophobic streak. She's never disavowed the cult and still sees the guy as a spiritual leader, far as I know.

R1, Thank you for your very informative response. Found the NY Mag link you recommended about Tulsi's very strange childhood.

I, Slut, is her name backwards, and it suits her: She is not sincere.

From R2's link which was suggested by R!, here's more info on Tulsi's guru.

R3, "Slut" implies that she's slept around for money, power, fame. Tulsi's childhood influence of a controlling guru which she still apparently follows is far, far more troubling. False for her to claim Hindu associations.

R1, Please read the following excerpt from R4's link,

Sen. Gabbard's Ponomauloa School in the late '80s in Wahiawa, O'ahu. . . . were taught at the schools to worship Butler and his wife Wai Lana as messengers of God. They also all said they were repeatedly exposed as children to Butler’s sexually graphic, deeply homophobic lectures.

. . . Butler's "secret," tape-recorded lectures. He said these lectures were repeatedly played for children at the SIF schools. The lectures were "full of vitriol and hate," he said. "So much hate towards gays, and basically anyone else who doesn't follow the path."

A mother's description of the changes in her son who joined Tulsi's cult is linked.

Other cult adherents say that there's absolutely no association between the cult and Hinduism. In fact students sang many Christmas carols at their cult school. Does that make Tulsi a liar for saying she's Congress' 1st Hindu?

From my link at R2,

. . . another girl, who say they would kill for him, describe his teachings “Flowers scream when they’re picked. So do trees when they’re trimmed.” (“Tulsi and Boni were sitting on the lawn chewing blades of grass when they said this,”

Butler taught vegetarianism, sexual conservatism, mind-body dualism, and disinterest in the material world. He taught a virulent homophobia, skepticism of science, and the dangers of public schools.. . .

Whenever Butler traveled, he’d have the homes he stayed in lined with tinfoil, to protect against electromagnetic radiation.

There's more. . .

Everyone I spoke to who was raised in the group described, as children, hearing Butler call men “faggots” and women “cunts.” One time in Malibu, Greg recalls, Butler had passed a man on the beach in a thong on his way to the gathering; Butler then described in graphic detail what that man allegedly wanted his “boyfriend” to do to him. “That’s vivid as a kid,”

Their father, a family physician named Willis Butler, took them, their mother, and their siblings to protest Vietnam. . . Their father was, in fact, a communist. The Butler patriarch loved the Soviet Union, thought North Korea a workers’ paradise. When Kurt brought home a geography book from school that mentioned political repression in the USSR, his father called it “lying propaganda.” When, as an adolescent, Chris pointed out that the Viet Cong had committed atrocities, his father wouldn’t hear it. Chris sought refuge in psychedelics . . .

Butler’s group, called Science of Identity, has had political ambitions at least since 1976, when its members formed a political party called Independents for Godly Government and ran a number of candidates in local races. They kept their association with Butler under wraps until, in 1977, the Honolulu Advertiser published a three-part series headlined “The Secret Spiritual Base of a New Political Force.”

Link to another cult member's perspective of Tulsi's guru.

Horrifying homophobia in Tulsi's cult, one member's sad story.