This began as a post on a Baha’i Facebook group

This began as a post on a Baha’i Facebook group in reply to a post from my buddy R who said:

So deeply ingrained is this prejudice. This essay should have national task forces spearheading community discussion and deepenings like lives depended on it.

My buddy R wrote in another place in regards to Sonja fine work:
So deeply ingrained is this prejudice. This essay should have national task forces spearheading community discussion and deepenings like lives depended on it.

I replied:

Well, if this was a serious, real religion… it would… this is all a demonstration to me that there is something inherently not right in the Bahaí Faith… and it breaks my heart, and to be honest it is why I have left it behind me.

There seems an unreal need to not want GLBT people… the need to hold the line against GLBT people, to shun, to ignore us… it so really sad.

At best people make excuses, we are a young religion, etc… but to me, the way in which the vast, overwhelming majority of Baha’is will not stand up for their glbt children, friends and colleagues, but so passively accepts this homophobia tells me, at least, that this may not be what I had thought when I enrolled so many years ago…

This Faith was once about tolerance, justice, love… where has it gone? Why this silence from the vast heterosexual majority? Why this need to condescendingly tell gay/lesbians over and over again what the “rules” state, without any compassion… thanks ever to Sonja… but to me, it all seems lost… it is so obvious to the greater non-Baha’i progressive community that the Baha’is are a very conservative and homophobic lot.

Any of us on this forum know of and see other religious communities who are doing a far better job at inclusiveness than any Baha’i community. Where as they all have the same sad teachings on homosexuality… they seem to enable places for GLBTs to feel welcomed, and do not treat them as diseased.

The Catholic gay folks I know do not live in fear of any removal of rights when you get married. The Buddhists I know do not exclude you, indeed do not care at all, they just enjoy your prescence. There are dozens of examples of communities in a diversity of spiritual beliefs that are far more advanced… what gives?

Really… there are, what, 6 million Bahaís in the world, and all we have are a very small handful of safe, progressive, tolerant postings on blogs?

This religion is so small, so insignificant; it makes me wonder why they even care if I am gay or not. Yet they use what little energy and meager resources to hound out GLBT’s… Where I ask, where are the soldiers of light in this fight?

This religion offers no hope or refuge for anything or anyone if it can’t do a better job with its GLBT friends, children and colleagues… this to me and many, many others is the canary in the mineshaft… no LSA’s or NSA’s or administrators OPENLY saying that enough is enough to the the world to our communities?

I see really nothing that we can be hopeful about here… sorry… just a few feeble hopes… but nothing from the leadership, telling the entire world that this homophobia must stop… Not even one community standing up for GLBT people! Nada!

I just read replies on various sites and it’s depressing – the homophobia tolerated – and the gays asked to leave. Meanwhile the rest of spiritual humanity has moved along… and the Baha’is remain insignificant and backward.

Shame!

a version of this is posted at: http://justabahai.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/on-the-psychopathology-of-homosexuality/