Justin's Political Corner
Tracie Felker and Joe Marion share a deep passion for Scouting. Each has a son who attained the top rank of Eagle, and each has spent numerous years and thousands of hours volunteering as Scout leaders, promoting Scout values.
And that’s where they diverge. When the Boy Scouts of America votes next week on whether to admit gay youth as members, Felker and Marion hope for opposite outcomes.
Marion says his issues have to do with logistics. He said admission of gay Scouts would put Troop 413, the pack he started five years ago, at risk of losing its charter. The troop would then have to find a new place to meet if First Baptist Church of Henderson, Tenn., pulls its sponsorship.
Then there are the other considerations, he says, like the ones related to the monthly camping trips his troop organizes.
“The problem is, do I let my kids who are straight share bathrooms and shower houses with kids who are not? How do I divide these kids up for camps? I mean, do I put the gay kids together and then the straight kids together?” he said.
Marion worries about the potential interaction during those sleepaways.
“What happens when a kid comes back from a trip where he was approached, or something did go on – what is the parent going to do? Who are they going to be mad at? Who are they going to lash out at? Me, because I’m the volunteer that took responsibility for their kid,” he said. “You understand why I’m concerned?”
Felker finds those arguments alarmist. A former merit badge coordinator, troop committee chair and two-time den leader, Felker calls the gay ban a form of discrimination that negates everything the Scouts stand for.
The proposal being considered by the national council of the Boy Scouts of America would allow openly gay boys into the program but continue to ban gay adults as leaders. The council’s 1,400-members will vote on the measure May 23 while in Texas for the organization’s national meeting.
Zach Wahls thinks the proposal is a good start but doesn’t go far enough because, among other things, it would exclude parents like his. The 21-year-old Iowa native was raised on Scouting from the time he was 6 by a lesbian couple.
“My mom, Jackie, was a den mother and my mom, Kerry, was an interim Cub Master,” said Wahls, founder of Scouts for Equality, a group with more than 6,500 Eagle Scouts like himself and other Scout alumni advocating for the admission of gay youth and adults.
h/t: Today.NBCNews.com
After writing a column for WorldNetDaily reprimanding the Boy Scouts of America for proposing a policy to lift the ban on gay members under the age of eighteen, Linda Harvey of Mission America took to the airwaves today to warn Scout leaders that such a move will “betray children” and engender “destructive psychological dynamics” within the organization. She alleged that homosexuality is a “high-risk and sinful lifestyle” and that gay scouts will inevitably try to have “physical and sexual contact” with their “fellow troop members who may not welcome this attention.”
NEW YORK — Under pressure over its longstanding ban on gays, the Boys Scouts of America is proposing to lift the ban for youth members but continue to exclude gays as adult leaders.
The Scouts announced Friday that it would submit this proposal to the roughly 1,400 voting members of its National Council at a meeting in Texas the week of May 20.
Earlier, the BSA had indicated it might give local Scout units the option of admitting gays as both youth members and adult leaders, or continuing to exclude them
The BSA said Friday it changed course due in part to results of surveys sent out this year to members of the scouting community.
Gay-rights groups have demanded a complete lifting of the ban. Some churches and conservative groups want it maintained.
It’s that time of year again when Girl Scouts sell cookies… and right-wing activists attack the Girl Scouts. Today, Linda Harvey of Mission America took offense that the Scouts support “radical feminists” and “homosexual lifestyles” and “feature prominent female homosexuals in some of their materials.” She alleged that they dismiss “authentic morality, Christianity, conservative viewpoints and just plain old motherhood” and “sexual self-restraint” while at the same time promoting “an attitude of suspicion toward males.”
In her blogpost on her show’s website, far-right anti-LGBTQ homophobic KFTK radio host Dana Loesch makes baseless cheap shots against people who support allowing gays into the Boy Scouts of America and also mocks the “It Gets Better” campaign founded by Dan Savage.
She even mocked the ACLU, protesters against Chick-Fil-A, and even against Attorney General Eric Holder in her farce of a PSA.
Her blogpost that’s full of lies on DanaLoeschRadio.com:
It gets better, unless you’re the Boy Scouts, then culture puts a ‘kick me’ sign on your back.The PSAs that tell kids “It gets better?” Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t. It never gets better. It stays the same. Bullies grow up to be bigger bullies, bullies who join the ACLU, MMfA, OFA, or some hokey acronym’d org and then get paid to bully others for a living. I had a bully once.
Apparently it never dawned on any of these activists that here in America you can start your own group and create your own rules. If you dislike how the Boy Scouts operate, then don’t join. Churches sponsor around 70% of the Scout troops anyway, so it’s not like their beliefs are a secret. Create your own group and run it your own way.This insistence that everyone be of hive mind and accept the same things and establish a boring homogenous culture where if everyone is special no one is betrays the “individualism” that the left preaches. If you’re so “pro-choice,” then leave the choice of which group to join or support to the people. Offer them competition. Create other choices, alternatives.
But stop the bullying and the lawfare. That doesn’t make it better.
And to make things worse for Loesch and other homophobic loons on the right, the majority of Americans surveyed in a Quinnipiac poll released today (02.06.2013) supports allowing gays into the BSA 55%-33%, or a +22% differential in favor of allowing them in.
Total:
Continue ban 33% End ban 55 DK/NA 12
Dem/GOP/IND:
Dem:
Continue ban 19% End ban 71% DK/NA 10%
GOP:
Continue ban 51% End ban 33% DK/NA 16%
IND:
Continue ban 31% End ban 57% DK/NA 12%
Quinnipiac:
The Boy Scouts of America should drop its ban on openly gay members, American voters say 55 - 33 percent in a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.
There is a large gender gap as women support gay scouts 61 - 27 percent, compared to 49 - 39 percent among men, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. White Catholics support gay scouts 63 - 25 percent. Among white Protestants, 44 percent say open up scouting and 41 percent say no. White evangelical Protestants oppose gay scouts 56 - 33 percent.
One troubling finding for Scouting in America is that 54 percent of voters say they were Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, while only 36 percent of voters, including 55 percent of former scouts, say they have children in Scouting.
“Now that the Armed Forces ban on openly gay service members has been lifted, and polls show increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage, most American voters think it’s time to open up the Boy Scouts too,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
IRVING, Texas — The Boy Scouts of America put off a decision Wednesday on whether to lift its ban on gay members and leaders, saying the question will be taken up at the organization’s national meeting in May.
“After careful consideration and extensive dialogue within the Scouting family, along with comments from those outside the organization, the volunteer officers of the Boy Scouts of America’s National Executive Board concluded that due to the complexity of this issue, the organization needs time for a more deliberate review of its membership policy,” Deron Smith, the BSA director of public relations, said in a statement.
Smith said the organization’s national executive board will prepare a resolution for the 1,400 voting members of the national council to consider. The annual meeting will take place in May, 2013, in Grapevine, Texas.
BSA announced last week it was considering allowing troops to decide whether to allow gay membership. That news has placed a spotlight on executive board meetings that began Monday in Irving, Texas, where scouting headquarters is located.
Smith said last week that the board could take a vote Wednesday or decide to discuss the policy, but that the organization would issue a statement either way. Otherwise, the board has remained silent, with reporters barred from the hotel where its meetings are taking place.
At nearby BSA headquarters, a handful of Scouts and leaders delivered petitions Monday in support of letting gay members join. The conservative group Texas Values, meanwhile, had organized a Wednesday morning prayer vigil urging the Scouts to keep their policy the same.
President Barack Obama, an opponent of the policy, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, an Eagle Scout who supports it, both have weighed in.
Perry, the author of the book “On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For,” said in a speech Saturday that “to have popular culture impact 100 years of their standards is inappropriate.”
Conservatives have warned of mass defections if Scouting allows gay membership to be determined by troops. Local and regional leaders, as well as the leadership of churches that sponsor troops, would be forced to consider their own policies. And policy opponents who delivered four boxes of signatures to BSA headquarters Monday said they wouldn’t be satisfied by only a partial acceptance of gay scouts and leaders.
h/t: Huffington Post
This week, the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America will reconsider the organization’s policy of barring gay Scouts and leaders. As a result of this proposed change, many conservatives are urging the group to maintain its discrimination.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has written extensively about how the Boy Scouts affected his life, and he reiterated those thoughts to hundreds of Texas Scouts who gathered in the state House of Representatives on Saturday for their annual Report to State. Speaking to reporters afterward, Perry defended the discriminatory policy:
PERRY: Hopefully the board will follow their historic position of keeping the Scouts strongly supportive of the values that make Scouting this very important and impactful organization. I think most people see absolutely no reason to change the position and neither do I… To have popular culture impact 100 years of their standards is inappropriate.
Perry also disagreed that a change would make the Scouts more tolerant, claiming, “I think you get tolerance and diversity every day in Scouting.”
Fellow former presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has offered a similar screed against theproposed change in the Scouts’ policy, suggesting the board’s vote this week is “a challenge to the Scouts’ very nature” that will cause a “mass exodus,” “leaving the Scouts hollowed at its core.” Indeed, a whole coalition of anti-gay hate groups is calling on the Scouts’ to maintain the policy because of the false assumption that all homosexuals are pedophiles.
Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said that a change in the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay members would be a “suicide mission” and lead to pedophilia. While speaking to AFA news director Fred Jackson yesterday on Focal Point, Fischer said that gay men are “ten times” more likely than heterosexuals to molest children, and it would be “insanity” to have them “bunking down with your kid at jamboree.”
“To me it’s just suicidal, they are finished, they are done,” Fischer told Jackson, “There is not one loving father in America that ever, ever, ever ought to entrust his son to the Boy Scouts of America.”
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
The Boy Scouts of America, one of the nation’s largest private youth organizations, is actively considering an end to its decades-long policy of banning gay scouts or scout leaders, according to scouting officials and outsiders familiar with internal discussions.
If adopted by the organization’s board of directors, it would represent a profound change on an issue that has been highly controversial — one that even went to the US Supreme Court. The new policy, now under discussion, would eliminate the ban from the national organization’s rules, leaving local sponsoring organizations free to decide for themselves whether to admit gay scouts.
“The chartered organizations that oversee and deliver scouting would accept membership and select leaders consistent with their organization’s mission, principles or religious beliefs,” according to Deron Smith, a spokesman for the Boy Scouts’ national organization.
Individual sponsors and parents “would be able to choose a local unit which best meets the needs of their families,” Smith said.
The discussion of a potential change in policy is nearing its final stages, according to outside scouting supporters. If approved, the change could be announced as early as next week, after the BSA’s national board holds a regularly scheduled meeting.
Only seven months ago, the Boy Scouts affirmed a policy of banning gay members, after a nearly two-year examination of the issue by a committee of volunteers convened by national leaders of the Boy Scouts of America, known as the BSA.
In a statement last July affirming the ban, its national executive board called it “the best policy for the organization.”
But since then, a scouting official said, local chapters have been urging a reconsideration. “We’re a grassroots organization. This is a response to what’s happening at the local level,” the official said.
“It’s an extremely complex issue,” said one Boy Scouts of America official, who explained that other organizations have threatened to withdraw their financial support if the BSA drops the ban.
While the national scouting organization sets broad policies, more than 290 local councils nationwide govern the day-to-day conduct of the more than 116,000 local organizations. Individual scouting troops are sponsored by religious and civic organizations that represent a diversity of views on the issue of allowing gay scouts and leaders.
It’s a good sign for America and the Boy Scouts of America by allowing gay scouts into the club. I expect that there will be a fundie/evangelical splinter group from the BSA (who prohibits atheists and agnostics) if this happens, similar to when the Girl Scouts of America in the early to mid 1990s decided to allow lesbians into the GSA and the substitution of “God” in their Promise.
h/t: NBCnews.com
Well, this is promising. But I mean, the real issue here is BSA’s ties to the LDS church. One out of eight scouts are Mormons. The LDS church registers every boy as part of their social programs for teens. They have a huge voice in the organization.
Also, what about non-believing members still being kicked out?
On agnostics and atheists, the BSA will still prohibit them (likely due to LDS influence). Once that ban on non-believing members is dropped, then the BSA will be a truly inclusive organization.
(via tinosloth)
The Boy Scouts of America, one of the nation’s largest private youth organizations, is actively considering an end to its decades-long policy of banning gay scouts or scout leaders, according to scouting officials and outsiders familiar with internal discussions.
If adopted by the organization’s board of directors, it would represent a profound change on an issue that has been highly controversial — one that even went to the US Supreme Court. The new policy, now under discussion, would eliminate the ban from the national organization’s rules, leaving local sponsoring organizations free to decide for themselves whether to admit gay scouts.
“The chartered organizations that oversee and deliver scouting would accept membership and select leaders consistent with their organization’s mission, principles or religious beliefs,” according to Deron Smith, a spokesman for the Boy Scouts’ national organization.
Individual sponsors and parents “would be able to choose a local unit which best meets the needs of their families,” Smith said.
The discussion of a potential change in policy is nearing its final stages, according to outside scouting supporters. If approved, the change could be announced as early as next week, after the BSA’s national board holds a regularly scheduled meeting.
Only seven months ago, the Boy Scouts affirmed a policy of banning gay members, after a nearly two-year examination of the issue by a committee of volunteers convened by national leaders of the Boy Scouts of America, known as the BSA.
In a statement last July affirming the ban, its national executive board called it “the best policy for the organization.”
But since then, a scouting official said, local chapters have been urging a reconsideration. “We’re a grassroots organization. This is a response to what’s happening at the local level,” the official said.
“It’s an extremely complex issue,” said one Boy Scouts of America official, who explained that other organizations have threatened to withdraw their financial support if the BSA drops the ban.
While the national scouting organization sets broad policies, more than 290 local councils nationwide govern the day-to-day conduct of the more than 116,000 local organizations. Individual scouting troops are sponsored by religious and civic organizations that represent a diversity of views on the issue of allowing gay scouts and leaders.
It’s a good sign for America and the Boy Scouts of America by allowing gay scouts into the club. I expect that there will be a fundie/evangelical splinter group from the BSA (who prohibits atheists and agnostics) if this happens, similar to when the Girl Scouts of America in the early to mid 1990s decided to allow lesbians into the GSA and the substitution of “God” in their Promise.
h/t: NBCnews.com
More bad news for the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), as a major donor has announced plans to sever funding to the organization on account of a controversial anti-gay policy.
The United Parcel Service (UPS), Inc. will soon adopt a non-discrimination policy that disqualifies the BSA from future funding, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) reports. UPS follows the Intel Foundation in withdrawing corporate sponsorship from the BSA, GLAAD officials note in an email statement.
“UPS and The UPS Foundation do not discriminate against any person or organization with regard to categories protected by applicable law, as well as other categories protected by UPS and The UPS Foundation in our own policies,” UPS officials note on the company’s website. “These include, but are not limited to race, gender, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran or military status, pregnancy, age and religion.”
Among those to applaud the UPS move was Zach Wahls, the Iowa student whoseimpassioned pro-gay marriage speech to his state’s legislators became the most-watched political clip of 2011 on YouTube after going viral twice last year.
The petition also noted that UPS gave more than $150,000 to the Boy Scouts of America, despite the organization’s policy banning gay Scouts and leaders from participating, just two years ago.
The issue had been brought the forefront again after the case of Jennifer Tyrrell, the Ohio-based mother who was forced to resign as den leader of her son’s Tiger Scout group because she is a lesbian.
For more than 80 years, the Boy Scouts of America have been keeping tabs on suspected pedophiles. Today, some 20,000 pages of those documents from 1966 to 1985 will go public in a searchable database, giving us a glimpse of exactly how “safe” the Boy Scouts kept their boys. There are around 1,250 Scout volunteers across the country named in those files. But the Boy Scouts aren’t making their files public out of the goodness of their heart, they’re doing so because there’s a court-order to release those files—a court order which came after a $20 million judgment the Scouts were ordered to pay by a jury which found that the Scouts failed to protect six boys (now men) from an assistant Scoutmaster who had admitted to molesting other scouts and a Los Angeles Times investigation in which found that the Scouts had kept abuses to themselves. “In about 400 of those cases — 80 percent — there is no record of Scouting officials reporting the allegations to police,” reported The Los Angeles Times’s Kim Christensen and Jason Felch in September. On October 1, when the release of the files were announced, the Scouts promised to go over the files report pedophiles they might have missed to police.
RELATED: Boy Scouts Promise to Report the Pedophiles They Didn’t
The “online database will include the name, troop, date of the accusation and a brief description. Click on the links and you’ll be able to see some 15,000 pages of the Scouts’ documentation, with the names of victims redacted,” reports The Seattle Times’s Maureen O’Hagan. The pages will be made public after a press conference Thursday.
H/T: Yahoo! News
Teen denied Eagle Scout for disobeying ‘duty to God’ by being gay (via Raw Story )
The Boy Scouts of America on Thursday said that they had denied a gay California teen Eagle Scout honors because he had not lived up to the principle of “duty to God” with his sexual orientation. The Scoutmaster for Troop 212 in Moraga decided that Ryan Andresen was “no longer eligible for membership…
President Barack Obama, the honorary president of the Boy Scouts of America, has endorsed an end to the organization’s ban on LGBT scouts and members.
The Boy Scouts of America announced today that it will continue its long-standing policy of discrimination against LGBT scouts and scout leaders and will take no action on proposals to reconsider that policy. This comes despite growing pressure to lift the ban from Eagle Scouts, an Ohio mom removed from her position as a Cub Scout den leader purely because she is a lesbian, and two prominent national board members.
A spokesman said a secret 11-person committee, appointed in 2010 to study the issue, “came to the conclusion that this policy is absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts.” The group dismissed the announcements by Ernst & Young CEO James Turley and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, both members of the BSA national board, that the group ought to lift its ban.
Last month, the BSA said that a resolution introduced in April proposing that local chartering units be able to determine whether to welcome LGBT participants and leaders would be “handled with respect.” With no apparent board consideration, the group says it will take no further action on the proposal.
