Sexual Sins

We verily, have forbidden you lechery.

It condemns infidelity in marital relationships, and all manner of promiscuity, of easy familiarity, and of sexual vices.

Considering that the perpetration of an immoral sexual act by one adult against another is punishable by law, the perpetration of such an act against a helpless child seems indeed heinous.

If a Bahá’í woman suffers abuse or is subjected to rape by her husband, she has the right to turn to the assembly for assistance and counsel, or to seek legal protection.

It is difficult to imagine a more reprehensible perversion of human conduct than the sexual abuse of children, which finds its most debased form in incest.

Masturbation is clearly not a proper use of the sex instinct, as this is understood in the Faith. Moreover it involves . . . mental fantasies, while Bahá’u’lláh, in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, has exhorted us not to indulge our passions and in one of His well-known Tablets ‘Abdu’l-Bahá encourages us to keep our “secret thoughts pure”.

One of the most heinous of sexual offenses is the crime of rape.

They that follow their lusts and corrupt inclinations, have erred and dissipated their efforts. They, indeed, are of the lost.

We shrink, for very shame, from treating of the subject of boys. Fear ye the Merciful, O peoples of the world! Commit not that which is forbidden you in Our Holy Tablet, and be not of those who rove distractedly in the wilderness of their desires. (Aqdas, paragraph 107)

The word translated here as "boys" has, in this context, in the Arabic original, the implication of paederasty [anal intercourse between a man and a boy]. Shoghi Effendi has interpreted this reference as a prohibition on all homosexual relations.