1306 Scouting Icon Begins Its Surrender
For more than a century there has been one premiere national organization trusted more than any other with the hearts and minds of boys and young men. It successfully executed its mission to prepare new generations with the sacred traits of mental clarity, moral purity, courage in adversity and reverence to God.
On May 23rd the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) took its first steps down a completely different trail. The 1,400 member national council voted to accept openly homosexual individuals under 18 years of age into membership. At the same time, in a doomed-to-fail compromise, they preserved rules against homosexual leaders and against any “sexual conduct”.
It is not difficult to predict the eventual conquest of Scouting by homosexual doctrine. Many others have taken this leftward fork in the road thinking that compromise was the honorable and charitable course. Every one of them soon found out that the forces they are dealing with do not play by the same rules of honor or charity as others do.
The homosexual rights battle is manifestly about ideology and strategy, not kids. There is no other reason to specifically target an openly traditional values private organization when multitudes of other alternatives exist. It is strategy. It always has been. It is targeted incrementalism; the patient, creeping, step-by-step campaign to fully normalize alternative sexual behaviors. Compromise is the movement’s most powerful weapon. After the BSA’s announcement, leftist troops were already complaining and rallying for the next campaign.
Skeptics will not have to wait long to see the next assault. The necessity to compromise will come in one of two ways. A junior-higher will come home one day to report that while discussing his orientation with a cabin-mate, he felt marginalized, unaccepted or put-upon when a listener exercised his equal freedom to disagree on moral grounds. Off to court they will march. It is just as likely that a merit badge-laden, respected homosexual Eagle Scout will pass from the age of seventeen at 11:59pm to the age of eighteen at 12:00am. When he attempts to continue as a leader, he will be reminded that he does not qualify for leadership because of his formerly accepted orientation. How is it, he and his family will rightfully challenge (again in court), that at 11:59pm he was “morally straight” and “reverent” but at 12:00am he began violating his oath by simply existing and is unqualified to be a leader to the same boys he just spent years with?
The tragedy of the new BSA is actually more immediate for now. The message to our children is clear and unmistakable. Sexual compulsions are now off limits to any challenge of sound logic, objective evidence, or conviction of conscience. The feelings and self-perceptions of others, eventually including senior Scouts, creates their own BSA-validated system of acceptable sexual behavior.
BSA leadership continues to proclaim its devotion to children’s safety in spite of legitimizing one of the most dangerous lifestyles ever studied. They continue to claim absolute allegiance to mental discipline while simultaneously sanctioning “born this way” propaganda that has no basis in scientific fact. And, of all things, they claim to embrace reverence toward God – the same Judeo-Christian God they have honored for a hundred years; the God who offers deliverance and forgiveness from a practice that He calls idolatrous and places on the same level as adultery and licentiousness.
This is not just a turning point for the BSA. More importantly, it is a turning point for conservative families and supporters. Many believe that they will still be able to work within local Scout troops and be ministers of good in spite of the new standards. That will work until that middle-schooler or Eagle Scout complains. At that point, the stipulation which requires compliance by chartering units “regardless of their religious convictions” will catch up and one of those well-meaning folks will find themselves in front of a judge.
The reality is that every dollar of support from families, churches and others will now go to further the agenda of ideological homosexuality. While adults roll down the inevitable slope, the messages of false humanity, false love, false morality and false religion will be cheerfully anchored in the souls of their children.
When the same process began in the Girl Scouts of America, former Scouting parents formed the American Heritage Girls. It is time to begin creating the same alternatives for boys.