On My Honor: Morally Straight
Michael Bray, 2008
On My Honor: Morally Straight
The Boy Scouts Of America have come under heavy fire for excluding professed homosexuals from membership. Some Councils have wavered, but they have not buckled under as the Girl Scouts of America have. Cradle of Liberty Council, a division of the Boy Scouts which serves 64,000 young men in the Philadelphia area, abandoned its allegiance to the national policy of excluding homosexuals and atheists after being coerced by the city civil authorities to change on pain of being thrown out of their meeting place. (They repented in December and returned to original principles and policies. Now the threat abides upon those young men of Philadelphia as a final resolution is in the waiting.)
The general steadfastness of the national B.S.A. may be set in stark contrast to the national “sister” organization, the Girl Scouts of America, which has steadfastly capitulated to the pagan culture revolution at every step of the way. Breaches of the public trust may be found, then, in the GSA, the city of Philadelphia, and in the many corporations which have worked financial hardship upon the Scouts in an effort to coerce them into conformity with ascendant atheism and immorality.
The Offensive Oath
The Oath which all members of the Boy Scouts of America are obliged to pledge says, in part: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country.” The Oath also requires every Scout to declare that he will keep himself “morally straight.” Without declaration of this fundamental creed, a young man may not be a member of the Boy Scouts of America.
Now in our times, any declaration of a standard of ethics or decency incites the Godless to rise in vehement opposition. Any principle or policy which “excludes” the morally crooked (a.k.a. “gay”) cannot be tolerated. In particular, anyone who invokes timeless standards, such as the very Laws of God, is resisted by those who would rise against the very concepts of Right and Wrong. The identity of “God” is presumed to be the God worshiped by the nation’s forefathers, although He is not specifically identified as the Triune God of Christianity. While that God is the One strongly implied in historical context, no Jew (or anyone else) has ever been interrogated to more accurately determine his doctrinal orthodoxy. The Scouts have always been quite tolerant.
But the recent onslaught against the B.S.A. has been hard for them to endure, and some have wavered. In contrast to their counter-sex Girl Scouts of America, however, they have endured done fairly well.
Harassment of the BSA
AT&T, CVS Pharmacy, Disney, K-Mart, Levi-Straus, United Way, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Knight-Ridder, Inc, and Public Broadcasting System (PBS) are examples of businesses which pulled their regular financial support from B.S.A. Some cities (Los Angeles) have banned the scouts outright from using public facilities. Others (Philadelphia) have effectively raised the rent beyond their reach.
Legal minds are casting about looking for some lawful means of persecuting the Scouts for their heretically outmoded attachment to old fashioned dogma. Russell J. Upton, writing in the American University Law Review, argues for the removal of the Scouts state tax exempt status.
Some legal institutions have come to the aid of the Scouts. The U.S. Supreme Court, occasionally discovering what is good and right, opined in 1999 that the national Boy Scouts, as a private organization, had the right to exclude homosexuals from its ranks. (How gracious, these mavens of wisdom and justice). And five years later, Congress passed the Support Our Scouts Act to protect local troops from government attempts to strip them of access to public facilities.
But denunciation and harassment continues from many institutions. Leslie Carbone reports that “Boy Scouts appearing on the dais at the 2000 Democratic National Convention were actually booed by delegates, adults who apparently thought it proper to boo children for belonging to an organization that safeguards them.” Modernist versions of Judaism (Reformed) and Scripture-detached religious groups like the Unitarians along with apostate Christian denominations such as the United Methodists and Episcopalians have passed resolutions condemning the Boy Scouts.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia is apparently doing the bidding of homosexuals or their co-belligerents. Citing a local 1982 “fair practices” law, the city solicitor had given the Scouts “until Dec. 3, 2007 to renounce its policy of excluding homosexuals or forfeit the grand, Beaux-Arts building it has rented from the city for $1 a year since 1928.” Homosexual City Solicitor Romulo Diaz said, “we will not subsidize that discrimination by passing on the costs to the people of Philadelphia.” In order to comply with the “law” as Diaz sees it, the city must make the building available and would charge as for any other tenant $200,000 per year for rent. How equitable, except that the Boy Scouts built the building and gave it to the city with the agreement that they would rent it for a nominal fee “in perpetuity.”
The City resolution to cut off the Boy Scouts was introduced by Councilman Darrell L. Clarke on May 31 and passed, 16-1, with no debate. The only hope for the Scouts after the 3 December deadline passed was better treatment from the incoming Mayor Nutter in 2008.
Betrayal of the Next Generation
The GSA has not done so well as a national organization. They have not suffered the direct financial and public coercion tactics that the BSA has endured. There’s has been a more gradual subversion, like that of national Christian church organizations. Their leadership was replaced by those who reject that organization’s creeds so that the national organization is fully perverted as an advocate of lesbianism, abortion rights, environmentalism, and women’s liberation (from Biblical and traditional roles of homemaking). And like those mainline church associations whose message was preserved through exodus and reformation of a new churches and denominations, so the original mission of the GSA is preserved through the establishment of a new organization.
The Girl Scouts might mark their slide downward from the point when they removed “loyalty” from their oath in 1972 on the grounds that it was outmoded. They were more evidently overtaken when they admitted arch-feminists Betty Friedan and those of that ilk onto their Board of Directors back in 1977. Friedan took the opportunity to use that platform to proclaim her support of the so-called Equal Rights Amendment with all its egalitarian (and, thus, anti-homemaker) doctrine. The subversion process has been rapid:
In 1980, the Girl Scouts changed their guidelines on homosexuality. The organization adopted a “non-discrimination” policy, making clear it would thereafter welcome lesbians, either as scouts or as troop leaders. . .
In 1989, a program titled “Decisions for Your Life: Preventing Teenage Pregnancy” was implemented. One of the program’s stated goals was that “with the help of community resource consultants, sex education will be a program component of the Girl Scouts.” In some places, these community resource consultants ended up being Planned Parenthood. In fact, in a 2004 interview with NBC News, Girl Scouts CEO Kathy Cloninger stated, “We have relationships … with Planned Parenthood organizations across the country, to bring information-based sex education programs to girls.”
What is the breach of trust here? It is the betrayal of the younger generation by the older. When doctrine, pledges, and creeds are cast away without any thought to their role in preserving the morality of the next generation, this is a breach of the next generation’s trust. The young ought to be able to put some trust in those who have gone before them. And each generation has a duty not only to itself but to those who succeed them. What kind of heritage do we leave for our children? We commend the leaders of the BSA and we curse those who have led the GSA astray even while we give thanks for those who have come out and re-established new institutions.
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