This makes me sad

There are 300,000 of my co-religionists in Iran. They make up the largest religious minority in that country. Education is incumbent upon Bahá’ís. We are expected to build our capacity as human beings, in service to building a better world. Here in the States, us CIC-ers are guaranteed access to education, pending certain institutional, classist, racist structures that (God willing) we can all work to dismantle. I know we all value the right to higher education, because we are all here in graduate school. My brothers and sisters in Iran are systematically denied that right: "The government has used a very simple mechanism to exclude Bahá’ís from higher education: it has simply required that everyone who takes the national university entrance examination declare their religion. And applicants who indicate other than one of the four officially recognized religions in Iran — Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism — are excluded." "...For Bahá’ís, the entire process is cynically calculated to accomplish a number of government objectives. First, it apparently seeks to demoralize Iranian Bahá’í youth in an effort to induce them to leave the country. Second, it allowed Iranian authorities to identify by name those Bahá’ís with outstanding academic ability, who might at some point play a role in helping to revive the Bahá’í community’s fortunes. Third, it allowed the Iranian government to say to international human rights monitors that they had given the Bahá’ís a chance to enroll — and that it was the Bahá’ís themselves who refused the opportunity. "Yet the government, of course, has long been aware that Bahá’ís cannot and will not as a matter of religious principle falsify or misrepresent their beliefs. Without doubt, then, Iran’s actions amount to nothing less than government sponsored policy aimed at denying an entire generation of Bahá’ís their right to higher education." Read more at http://denial.bahai.org