Testimonial letter from Carol Martin
This letter is one of a remarkable series of over 2650 letters amassed in 1983 to support Osho's attempt to get permanent resident status in the US at the time of the Oregon ranch. The image is reproduced here with the kind permission of The Oregon Historical Society. Information about their collection of these letters and other supporting material -- the "Jeffrey Noles Rajneesh Collection", named for Osho's immigration lawyer Jeffrey Noles, who compiled them in 1983 and donated them to the OHS -- can be found at this page. The wiki is grateful to the OHS for making access available for these documents. For more information and links to all the letters, see Testimonial letters.
This letter is from Carol Martin. It is "Exhibit A-1344" in the Noles collection.
The text version below has been created by optical character recognition (OCR), from the images supplied by OHS. It has not been checked for errors but this process usually results in over 99% correct transcription. Most apparent "errors" are correct transcriptions of typos already in the original. The image on the right in the text box links to a pdf file of the original letter, it has one page.
 Carol Martin To Whom It May Concern: I am writing this letter in support of Rajneesh and his community in Oregon, Rajneesh is a religions leader, who, in accordance with our history of respect for freedom of religion, should be allowed to stay in this country with his followers. I am not a follower of Rajneesh but I have friends who have been positively influenced by him. And I feel it’s important to understand that Rajneesh and the members of his organization do not proselytize for membership, as some recently imported religions have, I am against any effort to remove Rajneesh from this country. He has many followers from several different countries, mostly from Europe and the United States, and they should be allowed to follow their religious practices. Sincerely, |
(Please note: We assume that the above letter is still copyrighted, but we regard its historical interest to constitute a Fair Use exception for publication in this wiki.)
