Word: santeria
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...goats, 14 chickens, 14 guinea hens and several doves will be offered as sacrifices. The carcasses will be butchered in the garage and prepared for the next day's feast. As many as 100 people will attend to celebrate the "birth" of their newest Santeria priest...
...believers in Santeria, ritual sacrifices are essential to winning the favor of the gods and initiating new members into the priesthood. To animal- rights activists, they are gratuitous carnage. In Los Angeles and in Hialeah, Florida, where Santeria is spreading quickly through the Latin, Caribbean and African-American communities, the activists have pressed for laws prohibiting sacrifices. It now falls to the Supreme Court to decide whether those laws violate the Constitution's protection of "free exercise" of religion...
...Justices will hear arguments next month in the case of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, a Santeria congregation led by Ernesto Pichardo that held its services in a former used-car dealership in Hialeah. Worried about the city's image, irate animal-rights activists, community leaders and politicians united to pass an anti-sacrifice ordinance in 1987. For animal-rights groups, it was a natural extension of long-established laws on animal cruelty or of more recent crusades to halt animal research...
Pichardo contends that his rituals are no different from hunting or commercial slaughtering of animals for meat. "You can buy Chicken McNuggets in Hialeah," says Jorge Duarte, an attorney for the Santeria church, "but you can't kill a chicken for religious reasons." Santeria spokesmen insist that unlike the gruesome rituals still routinely performed in Cuba, their sacrifices are humane and no animals are tortured. But opponents disagree. "Carcasses are polluting our rivers and rotting in the streets," says ! Marian Lentz of the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida. Pichardo admits that some offbeat cults may be responsible for the animals...
...practices at issue are as ancient as Cain and Abel. Animal sacrifice was central to Judaism until the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed 19 centuries ago, continues as an annual ritual performed by all Muslims, and has been a part of African animistic religions as far back as records exist. Santeria's spiritual roots reach back 4,000 years to the Yoruba tribe in southern Nigeria. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the slave communities of Cuba blended worship of Roman Catholic saints with their ancient African rites...