The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there
-L. P. Hartley
The Baha'i religion is a New Religious Movement (NRM) that developed out of Shi'a Islam, it began in the latter part of the 19th Century, when a man named Mirza Husayn-`Ali, Baha'u'llah, declared that he was the promised one of God, a world redeemer, that would usher in a era of peace and harmony. The Baha'is view Baha'u'llah as the messianic fulfillment not just of Islam but also of Judaism and Christianity, as well as other religious traditions such as Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism. Some of the basic principles of the Baha'is is that of the removal of all prejudice, the view that science and religion must be harmonized or religion is superstition, independent investigation of truth, equality among genders. With these principles one would anticipate that the Baha'i religion would be welcoming to LGBTQI people, however, this is not true. Openly LGBTQI people are either forced into a closet or have their administrative rights removed with some reporting outright excommunication. In the following I examine the LGBTQI issues in the Baha'i religion and why it is viewed so negatively. To understand a position we need to understand the society, culture and time-placeness of an particular cultural issue. The development of these beliefs is tied to the cultural heritage of the Middle East looking at Judaism, then Christianity, then Islam and finally in the modern Baha'i belief system we can gain appreciation for the time-placeness of specific viewpoints on LGBTQI people. Intrinsically aligned with the issue of sexuality is that of gender. The modern western view of binary gender identification is not a cultural universal, there are many genders in many different cultures, there is no one universal gender social construct. Even in Judeo-Christian-Islamicate culture there have been historically 3 gender identities, rather then the contemporary 2 gender identities.
