By making the “homosexuality is innate” argument, I’d be staking my anti-discrimination case on an empirical question which, if it unexpectedly turned out to be false, would seriously undermine what is actually a very worthwhile case.

Currently in the news are statements made by American “Sex in the City” actress, Cynthia Nixon, 45.

For 15 years, until 2003, she was in a relationship with a man. They had two children together. She then formed a new family with a woman, to whom she’s engaged. And she told The Times’s Alex Witchel that homosexuality for her “is a choice.”
“For many people it’s not,” she conceded, but added that they “don’t get to define my gayness for me.

(Cited in the New York times, “Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away”, 28 January 2012, by Frank Bruni)

There are two questions here: did she choose to be straight to start with? Or is she bisexual and so made a choice?

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The last thing you want is for members of your community to feel excluded because they don’t have access to the internet or aren’t great with computers.

Over the years, I’ve lived in a lot of different Baha’i communities and every one is different. My current community is especially interesting to me because it’s quite tech-savvy. In particular, we use Google’s Apps services to organize a variety of administration and activity. So I thought I would share some ideas on how to do this for your own community.

As you may know, Google offers a ton of different free services beyond its core search engine product. There’s a whole suite of products which are useful to Baha’i community administration and organization. In particular Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. Here’s how you can use them:

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The Center For The Bahai faith was burglarized sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon. Members tell KKTV 11 News they held a meeting Wednesday night that ended around 10:30 and arrived at the church Thursday around 4 p.m. for another meeting. That's when they discovered someone had broken and destroyed much of their property.

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Armen’s job at the pizza place didn’t last. He walked back down the state Employment Development Department to look for his next job. He got something after a few days. This job was not in Santa Cruz at all, but up in the Santa Cruz Mountains near the community called Bonny Doon. He’d need a bike. It was a long, strenuous ride up the Empire Grade, a road that starts at the UC campus and climbs high into the mountains. The job would be at the encampment of what was known around Santa Cruz as “the memo cult.” It sounded a little weird, but knowing Santa Cruz itself to be weird, and knowing that five bucks is five bucks, Armen didn’t think twice.

Armen found out that the members of the memo cult were fond of telling others about their religion, even a laborer like Armen—especially a laborer like Armen. They preferred to be called Recipients, short for the formal designation of their organization, “The Letter Day Recipients of the Memoranda of the Men on the Mountain.” They told him all about the memos for which their religion was named. There were six men—six was their holy number—who lived on a holy mountain. These clean-shaven greybeards would write up a memo every year, and sometimes they’d issue an additional memo for special occasions, say for instance, a bad day on Wall Street.

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