© Spunik / Ramil Sitdikov
An antigravity yoga class in Russia.
A conservative senator raised a few eyebrows in Russian after it emerged that she objects to yoga classes being held in prisons. The complaint reportedly implies that yoga can turn inmates gay and lead to rioting.
Yoga classes were introduced in some pretrial detention facilities in Moscow as a pilot project last year. It was hailed as a big success by jail officials. But it turns out that not everyone was supportive. One Russian senator lodged a complaint with the Prosecutor General's Office, requiring it to launch an official investigation into what yoga does for inmates,
Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reports.
The senator, Elena Mizulina, is a controversial figure in Russian politics. She is deeply conservative and has been behind several initiatives that some progressives regard as attempts to drag the country back to the Middle Ages. She has suggested restricting the right to abortion, discouraging divorce through taxation, raising the age of consent to 18, and enshrining Orthodox Christianity in the Russian constitution, to name but a few of her proposals.
According to the newspaper, her complaint
cited an expert opinion that some yoga exercises can "lead to uncontrolled fluxes of libido and consequently homosexual relationships" among inmates. Aleksandr Dvorkin, a US-educated historian and Orthodox theologian who made a name for himself in Russia fighting quasi-religious cults, further speculated that if career criminals - who tend to be homophobic - suspect yoga practitioners of being gay, they would refuse to take food from their hands. "This may escalate into a protest riot," he said.
Comment: The many problems associated with vaccines have been documented extensively here for many years, though the issue can likely be quite simply boiled down to: if vaccines didn't cause problems, there wouldn't be millions of people documenting and discussing the problems they cause, and conversely if vaccines were as effective as claimed to be, then the vaccinated would have nothing to worry about from the unvaccinated.