The White House continues to categorize Fox News as a biased source. There are many ways to look at this, but for me there are two obvious facts: 1, its true… and 2, so what?
Unless I missed something, the president’s advisors are saying that Obama will continue to appear on their shows. Maybe not as frequently, but he’ll show. Meanwhile, they are providing a reasonable service if they stop answering to lies and instead start calling them lies. There is value to having a conservative analysis of the news…. but no value in being lied to in the name of freedom of the press.
Baha’u'llah talks about the excess of liberty… when freedom of speech and freedom of the press is used to protect deliberately misleading statements, we are seeing an example of the excess of liberty.
This week, I was confronted with a flyer from the American Family Association, urging the boycott of Pepsico, for becoming a “major backer of homosexual agenda with $1,000,000 in gifts to gay groups”. Well…
I am a Baha’i. I was born Christian. I can definitely sympathize with the religious alarm at the legalization of “gay marriage” as I’ve struggled with this issue myself. That said – do I honestly believe I have a right to tell religions that don’t agree with me that they can’t sanction gay marriage? No. No I do not. Moreover, the flyer was so obviously alarmist and misleading that it offended me. One section says this:
“Pepsi forces all employees to attend sexual orientation and gender identity diversity training where they are taught to accept homosexuality.”
Wow. You know what? That’s just about a corporate requirement – to prevent lawsuits. Are we seriously singling out Pepsi for this? I rejected the flyer on that sentence alone – not to mention my resistance to the term “homosexual agenda.”
I’ve defined my own views on homosexuality and gay marriage here: http://www.windonwater.net/index.php?topic=205.msg913#msg913. But I want to state here for the record – the Iowa Decision felt, to me, like a vindication of my rejection of groups like the American Family Association, and their tactics. A common sense, well reasoned addressing of the issues yielded one of two possible just outcomes. My preference would have been to ban the use of the term marriage by civil institutions altogether, and extend civil unions to all… but the other possible outcome was to define “marriage” in the civil sense as a civil contract, and to extend it to all, as such.
The official summary of the Iowa Decision is at the link above…
Religious intolerance against the Baha’is by Muslims is by no means exclusively an Iranian affair… Here is a Portuguese paper reporting on an attack upon Baha’is in Egypt:
Dozens of villagers attacked Muslim homes in the last week, the elements of the Baha’i community in southern Egypt, after one of its elements have said on television that the village of Sharoyah near Sohagh, was full of religion that followed.
Monday and Tuesday have been burned and damaged four houses Baha’is, told the AFP a source of security services, in groups of human rights were alerted to this problem.
The fire spread to the homes of two Muslim families, which were also damaged, while the three dozen Bahá’ís of that city were threatened with death and accused of being “enemies of God.”
Off to the side, there’s a headline “If Obama was Pope.” Hmmm…
QT
I received this in my inbox today as part of a subscription to daily snippets from the Baha’i Writings. I found this particularly thought provoking and hopeful:
Together with the crumbling of barriers separating peoples, our age is witnessing the dissolution of the once insuperable wall that the past assumed would forever separate the life of Heaven from the life of Earth. The scriptures of all religions have always taught the believer to see in service to others not only a moral duty, but an avenue for the soul’s own approach to God. Today, the progressive restructuring of society gives this familiar teaching new dimensions of meaning. As the age-old promise of a world animated by principles of justice slowly takes on the character of a realistic goal, meeting the needs of the soul and those of society will increasingly be seen as reciprocal aspects of a mature spiritual life.
The Universal House of Justice, Message To the World’s Religious Leaders (Haifa: Baha’i World Centre, 2002) p. 5 Para 21. E-text from Ocean Library, http//:www.bahai-education.org
The Bahá’í calendar is more appropriately called the “Badi” or “wonderful” calendar. It is wonderful, because one of the Prophets of the Bahá’í faith designated, for each day, each month, and even each year, an Attribute of God – providing a personal reflection for every day. In the Bahá’í understanding attributes of God are also known as “Names of God” and so have the effect of invoking the Creator of all the Worlds. Hence, besides being a personal reflection, each birthday is a personal invocation.
The Badi calendar began in 1844, and consists of 19 months of 19 days each. It adds four or five intercalary days to complete the year. The largest unit of the Badi calendar is the Kull-i-Shay – a period of 361 years – which themselves are divided into 19 year divisions, each called a Váhid (unity).
Every year or so we get another story about police brutality toward blacks. Yet another unarmed man shot in the back – and the news media playing it really quietly. I’m doing my part to raise the profile:
The excitement astonishes presidential historians.
“I can’t recall another situation where there is this kind of interest before the president even takes office in terms of where he is going to go to church, and churches campaigning for his attendance,” said Gary Scott Smith, author of “Faith and the Presidency” and a history professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. “This is unique in American political history.”
The historic nature of the new First Family — as the first African Americans and the first in decades with small children — plus Obama’s high-profile difficulties with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is placing unprecedented attention on the family’s choice of a church. Normally, say historians and members of previous administrations, the selection rarely raises a ruckus.
Well, I grew up in the United Methodist Church, and whenever there is news of that church, I have a hope that they will be successful. Of course, Obama came to faith in the United Church of Christ, and I think that he will be more comfortable there. And – I have a strong desire, as part of demonstrating black culture to the wider American audience, for the Obamas to choose to worship in a black congregation.
That said, if the Obamas want to be really outside the box, perhaps they’d like to drop in on the DC Baha’i community! Ok, he couldn’t run for re-election if he became Baha’i, but there have been Baha’i political leaders here and there, so you never know! LOL!
