Seasons of Grace
Would you send your 12-year-old son on a camping trip with a gay troop leader? I wouldn’t. Just as parents would not send their pubescent girls to sleep in tents with men who are physically attracted to them, parents of boys should be just as wary of exposing their sons to the possibility of abuse.
Nor would I permit my 7-year-old son to join an organization where one of the questions they’d ask is his sexual orientation. Boy Scouts are kids, for Pete’s sake, and they don’t need to be thinking about sex; they need to be fishing and catching frogs.
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Today in Texas, rationality lost to political correctness, and the Boy Scouts of America changed forever. The Scouts’ 1,4000-member National Council, meeting in Grapevine, Texas, voted to allow openly gay youths to join scouting. The policy change, which will take effect on January 1, reads:
“No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.”
At least for now, the BSA will retain its ban on gay adult leaders.
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When Robert Baden-Powell founded the Scouts in 1907, he would certainly never have envisioned the trajectory which Scouting has taken since the Supreme Court ruled that the boys’ organization need not welcome homosexual troop leaders. The Promise to Self, the third part of the Boy Scout Oath, calls on youth to “keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”
Blogger Erin Manning, who writes as Red Cardigan, predicted a quick demise of the organization which has for over a century emphasized character development for young men:
You know what? This is it. This is the end of the Boy Scouts of America. Within ten years the organization’s membership will have fallen so precipitously that there will be no point in continuing on. All those openly gay ten-year-olds who have dreamed of being Scouts will find that there’s no Scouts left anymore.
Okay, that was a bit of snark, because there aren’t really very many openly gay ten-year-olds. What there are are openly gay 15, 16, 17, and 18 year-olds who think that the only reason parents wouldn’t want them to share tents with boys three or four years younger is homophobia and bigotry. I guess bigotry is the reason parents don’t like to let their eleven or twelve-year-old daughters go camping with high school-aged boys, too. I mean, how dare anybody suggest that it’s wrong to make pre-teens or teens share showers and tents with other teens who are sexually attracted to them! That’s just offensive.
But a whole lot of not-yet-brainwashed parents are not going to be okay with this. They’re not going to be okay with pro-homosexual indoctrination making its way, as it soon will, into the Scouts under the ubiquitous umbrella of “tolerance” and “inclusion.” They’re not going to be okay with pressure among troops to recruit gay members to prove they’re not actively barring them from joining (and if you don’t think this is going to happen, you are woefully naive about the end-game of the gay rights movement). They’re not going to be okay with adding an “LGBT Pride Badge” to the required badges necessary to make Eagle Scout.
So they’re going to take their children out of scouting. And traditional churches which have sponsored troops and allowed them to meet on church property are not going to sponsor troops or host meetings anymore. And private Catholic and Christian donors are going to pull their funds away from the Boy Scouts.
The backlash on the Internet tonight, on the first day of inclusivity, has been vociferous. And with more than 70% of the troops sponsored by faith-based organizations, the organization is likely to lose many sponsors who simply don’t want the controversy. The resultant exodus will shake the organization to its foundation.
For Catholic parents who want their sons to enjoy the fellowship and good citizenship which scouting offers, without the leftwing politics, may I suggest two alternatives: the Columbian Squires, and KEPHA.
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