5 Faith Facts about VP Pick Kamala Harris – a Black Baptist with Hindu Family

Religion News Service
August 13, 2020

http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2020/aug/13/5-faith-facts-about-vp-pick-kamala-harris-black-ba/

Sen. Harris

Few, if any, vice presidential candidates have had as much exposure to the world’s religions as U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, the 55-year-old from California whom Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden named Tuesday as his running mate.

Sen. Harris’ ethnic, racial and cultural biography represents a slice of the U.S. population that is becoming ascendant but that has never been represented in the nation’s second highest office.

Here are five faith facts about Sen. Harris:

She was raised on Hinduism and Christianity.

Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was from Chennai, India; her father, Donald Harris, from Jamaica. The two met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her name, Kamala, means “lotus” in Sanskrit, and is another name for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. She visited India multiple times as a girl and got to know her relatives there.

But because her parents divorced when she was 7, she also grew up in Oakland and Berkeley attending predominantly Black churches. Her downstairs neighbor, Regina Shelton, often took Kamala and her sister, Maya, to Oakland’s 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland. Sen. Harris now considers herself a Black Baptist.

She is married to a Jewish man.

Sen. Harris met her husband, Los Angeles lawyer Douglas Emhoff, on a blind date in San Francisco. They married in 2014. At their wedding, the couple smashed a glass to honor Mr. Emhoff’s upbringing . It is a traditional Jewish wedding custom.

It was Sen. Harris’ first marriage and Mr. Emhoff’s second. An article in the Jewish press described her imitation of her Jewish mother-in-law, Barbara Emhoff, as “worthy of an Oscar.”

She was criticized for not proactively assisting in civil cases against Catholic clergy sex abuse during the years she served as a prosecutor.

After graduating from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, Sen. Harris specialized in prosecuting sex crimes and child exploitation as a young prosecutor. But two investigations by The Intercept and The Associated Press found that Sen. Harris was consistently silent on the Roman Catholic Church’s abuse scandal — first as San Francisco district attorney and later as California’s attorney general.

Survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of priests say she resisted informal requests to help them with their cases and refused to release church records on abusive priests that had been gathered by her predecessor, Terence Hallinan.

As attorney general, Sen. Harris filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to refuse Hobby Lobby’s request to deny women health care coverage for contraception because of the craft store chain owner’s religious beliefs.

In her 2014 brief that was supported by 15 states and Washington, D.C., Sen. Harris wrote that if Hobby Lobby were allowed to withhold birth control coverage on religious grounds, it might lead other corporations to demand similar exemptions from the nation’s civil rights laws.

In the landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that family-owned corporations can’t be forced to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act if it offends their religious beliefs.