No parent is going to send their young sons camping alone in the woods with an openly gay man for the same reason they wouldn’t send their adolescent daughters to be alone in the woods with an openly heterosexual man. And now the BSA has been whiplashed into bankruptcy by liberals demanding, on one hand, that the scouts allow gays to be troop leaders and, on the other hand, filing lawsuits accusing the scouts of not taking strong enough measures to prevent gay troop leaders from molesting boys.
I wonder if any liberals are re-thinking their insistence that the Boy Scouts allow gay men to take 13-year-old boys on overnight camping trips.
HEADLINE: Boy Scouts Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the Face of Thousands of Child Abuse Allegations
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have long been on the left’s hate list. Any organization that has the temerity to train young men in the virtues of integrity, patriotism and self-reliance is putting itself on the fighting side of liberals!
At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, a little group of Boy Scouts took the stage as part of the opening ceremony — and were promptly booed by the delegates.
For decades, the BSA has fended off lawsuits demanding that they embrace the holy trinity of G’s: girls, gays and godless atheists. (If only it had occurred to the plaintiffs to start their own organizations! They could have given them names like “The Girl Scouts.”)
Why would any liberal want to join an organization that was, according to them, sexist, Bible-thumping and bigoted? They didn’t. The lawsuits were kill shots.
For the left, what’s not to hate about the Boy Scouts? Their oath is: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”
Nearly 200 NASA astronauts were Boy Scouts. The great outdoorsman, Teddy Roosevelt, was such a BSA booster than he was made the one and only “Chief Scout Citizen,” a scout for life.
A Louis Harris & Associates study in 1996 found that men who had been scouts placed a higher value on honesty than those who had not.
But now the lawsuits have killed them. Congratulations, Democrats, The New York Times and corporate America. (I hope all their future employees steal from them, after being raised on “Grand Theft Auto” instead of the Boy Scout oath.)
From the beginning, BSA has had to deal with child molesters eagerly signing up to go camping with 13-year-old boys in isolated areas away from all observation.
Within a decade of its 1910 founding, the BSA began keeping internal files on “ineligible” scouting volunteers, known as “the perversion files.”
Scout leaders were not to be alone with boys and, starting in 1988, all adult applicants were subjected to aggressive background screening. The organization promptly removed any scout leaders based on mere suspicion and alerted law enforcement in about a third of the cases.
Nonetheless, between 1970 and 1991, up to .04% of Boy Scouts may have been molested. That’s about 2,000 out of several million boys.
Given all of this, what sort of escaped mental patient would demand that the Boy Scouts admit openly gay scout leaders?
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