Just as we were closing our Washington, D.C. offices at the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) for the year-end holidays last week, an email appeared in my inbox. A U.S. District Court judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit HAF had filed against several individuals, ending a bitter 18-month legal journey.
Why HAF filed the suit, why its dismissal is disappointing, and why we see the judge’s 28-page decision’s statement that several defendants plausibly lied about HAF as a measure of vindication, situates the legal journey back to a dinner table in Philadelphia.
I was at that table just about two decades ago when a couple of doctors, lawyers and an engineer for good measure—a stereotypical trifecta of second-generation Indian American occupations of the time—charted out a threadbare constitution registering the first Hindu American advocacy organization in the United States.
The attorneys at that table, a law school classmate and I having attended law school in Florida, had come of age in the bottom edge of the Bible Belt and the crucible of the Moral Majority, Newt Gingrich and Billy Graham. We saw the need Hindu American legal advocacy as an unfilled niche as arguments about the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses were roiling during those times.
Our first legal foray was a 2005 amicus brief in a Supreme Court case. When Justice John Paul Stevens cited the HAF amicus brief in a dissenting opinion agreeing with HAF that a Ten Commandments monument on...
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