Ultimately, they don’t want to be accepted as genuine secular organization.
They want to exist as an organization.
As a private organization, it is within their purview to remain ostensibly supportive of the religious organizations that currently donate their property and legal framework to house 70% of the BSA’s remaining customers.
When you tell the BSA that they need to distance themselves from the groups providing the bulk of their funding and support, without providing any realistic alternative for where the money and the sponsors are going to come from, you’re telling them that many (perhaps all) of their troops need to go away and cease to exist. At this point in time, that’s pretty much an inevitable consequence for many troops and even councils.
Do I think this is a good situation? No. Our country and our society should be further along, but we’re not there yet, and essentially throwing down ultimatums isn’t likely to get us there. Are you prepared to disband even liberal and tolerant troops because other troops aren’t so tolerant?
Consider that many parents in this country, if given a choice between Trail Life and no Scouting group at all, would choose Trail Life even if they are not themselves bigoted, simply because LGBTQ issues simply aren’t a huge deal to many people and won’t be the main decision point. There are people who are passionate on both sides, but a large chunk of the population is actually fairly indifferent, mostly because they simply don’t see the relevance to their own lives.
Do you want to give support to an organization that has shown it is willing to change, even if only slowly and reluctantly, or to an organization that explicitly rejects homosexuality?
The ends justify the means.
Who suggested otherwise? Again, you are confusing two issues: what they have a right to do, and whether what they are doing is right. Nobody in this thread has disputed that as a private organization they have the right to embrace and enable conservative Christian anti-LGBT bigotry. But if that’s what they choose, I will continue to call them out for their despicable moral choices.
False dilemma. Given the fact that the BSA is literally going bankrupt because of the culture of abuse it fostered, it’s hardly the former. So my choice is a shitheap or a shitheap. Pass.
Cite? I missed where they fostered a culture of abuse. I thought they were just accused of not doing enough to prevent pedophiles and other abusers from having access to kids.
As nelliebly said earlier in the thread:
One organization did bad things, fired everyone who did them, changed all the rules around how to prevent the bad things that happened and embraced social changes that cost them 20% of their membership base. The other is happily bigoted and has no plans to change.
But yeah, they’re the same.
Back when I bought pretzels I did lean heavily towards the straight ones, but that was more because the pretzel-to-air ratios of the bags were higher.
Is it ethical to call them out for their moral choices when it is reasonably certain that the net result for your “calling out” is to push Scouting in the US to become more conservative, more bigoted, and less receptive?
What’s your end goal here: to make yourself feel morally superior, or to cause Scouting (or society in general) to become more tolerant? It is frequently true that those two goals are not mutually compatible. Personally, I think a more tolerant society is a more worthy goal, even if it means I have to engage and push and prod and cajole rather than demonize, and even if it means I have to accept half measures rather than reach for the stars and end up with nothing.
I’m not granting the premise of your ridiculous false dichotomy.
What part, specifically, do you find false?
BSA decided to allow gay Scouts in troops that were willing to accept them, and significant parts of the organization were so horrified at sharing with “the gays” that they ran off to form more conservative, more bigoted, and less receptive Scouting organizations (e.g., Trail Life and whatever the Mormons are calling their new group). If every troop is compelled to accept people/behavior their sponsoring organization believes to be immoral, what do you THINK is going to happen? How do you think conservative churches are going to react when they have viable alternatives to remaining part of BSA?
Right now, troops and councils within the Scouts can be divided into roughly three categories: those who accept LGBTQ rights more or less completely, those in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” camp, and those in the “thou shalt not” camp. I suspect many sponsoring organizations are in the last group, but more troops are in the DADT camp. If the sponsors are forced to make a choice, however, for many of them Trail Life is going to look pretty good, and every troop there is explicitly “thou shalt not” and “no gay people welcome.”
Even scouts in very bigoted troops will have the opportunity to meet scouts from more tolerant parts of the organization; Trailmen don’t get that chance.
Damn, that got posted! My phone acted up and I thought that it just disappeared.
I started to post about this, then wondered if I should or not. Eventually I decided to tell the story even though it is personal.
I had a direct experience which turned me off forever to scouting.
In or about 2004, I found out from my mother concerning some sexual abuse which a relative committed when he was working as a youth merit badge counselor in the summer at a scout camp in the mid 1970s. He would have been somewhere between 16 to 18 years old. It was discovered at the time but nothing was done officially other than having him quit and the police weren’t notified.
After I found out, I confronted this relative and he admitted to it, but he claimed that his acts of sexual abuse had just been when he was a youth and he had a clean record after that.
He was an adult scout leader in 2004 so I contacted the local BSA council and reported it, including his admission.
I talked to a couple of people at the council and we sent emails back and forth. I got the distinct impression they were not interested looking into the matter in any depth. My mom was willing to talk to them if they contacted her but they never did.
By this time, the Catholic Church sex scandals had already been widely reported, but sex abuse cases against BSA has not made national news yet.
Perhaps because of this, the people I talked to at the local council didn’t want to deal with it.
I followed up the best I could, but I was in Japan with a 16 hour time difference and eventually realized there wasn’t anything I could do.
The abuse had happened at a well-known scout camp in Utah but I have no idea if any records had been made. As a minimum, I think they should have at least contacted my mother and talked to the relative as he had admitted to me what had happened.
I don’t know if he did anything as an adult, but he should never have been put in a position where he had access to boys again. Period. Child abuse is just too serious of an issue.
By 2004, BSA should have been better informed about the dangers of sexual abuse. It’s inexcusable to not have taken the complaint seriously. It’s just another organization which tried to save its own ass, vulnerable boys be damned.
Ok, I do accept this: that some conservative Christian groups are so wedded to their anti-LGBT bigotry that if the BSA does not let exercise their bigotry within the BSA, they will leave and exercise their bigotry outside it. So be it. The notion that we will somehow change hearts and minds by accommodating and implicitly granting approval to despicable attitudes is bogus. Civilized people in the modern world treat all people with respect and dignity.
The BSA needs to decide what its values are. And if it decides to accommodate anti-LGBT bigotry for the sake of maintaining membership, it should be called out and condemned for doing so.
He said it was a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy means there are more than two possible choices, and that you are trying to force him into picking one or the other. You argued that the only choices are to let the BSA continue to get away with being bigoted or make scouting more bigoted.
The Mormons splitting off doesn’t make scouting more bigoted, but the opposite. They lost the ability to enforce their bigotry on those who are not Mormon, while their own bigotry remained unchanged. That is a net decrease in bigotry.
There is also very little chance that any other conservative Christian groups are going to join the explicitly Mormon group. They may have put up with them in BSA, but conservative Christians see Mormons as just as bad as atheists and gay people. What might happen is that, if the BSA becomes more tolerant, they might choose to create their own organization. But that, once again, means they stop being able to force their bigotry on those who are not part of their religion, and thus there is less bigotry overall in Scouting.
There’s also a fundamental flaw in your argument that goes beyond the actual facts. You ar
He said it was a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy means there are more than two possible choices, and that you are trying to force him into picking one or the other. You argued that the only choices are to let the BSA continue to get away with being bigoted or make scouting more bigoted.
The Mormons splitting off doesn’t make scouting more bigoted, but the opposite. They lost the ability to enforce their bigotry on those who are not Mormon, while their own bigotry remained unchanged. That is a net decrease in bigotry.
There is also very little chance that any other conservative Christian groups are going to join the explicitly Mormon group. They may have put up with them in BSA, but conservative Christians see Mormons as just as bad as atheists and gay people. What might happen is that, if the BSA becomes more tolerant, they might choose to create their own organization. But that, once again, means they stop being able to force their bigotry on those who are not part of their religion, and thus there is less bigotry overall in Scouting.
You also seem to presume that, if the BSA stops existing, that means those will be the only scouting organizations. But, assuming scouting is actually valued outside of conservative Christian circles, a new organization would arise to take its place. OR, heck, maybe the explicitly not-bigoted Girl Scouts will just take them all on, becoming the only actual official American scouting organization. (Do note that the BSA and GSUSA are both officially the scouting organizations of the US, by law.)
There’s also a fundamental flaw in your argument that goes beyond the actual facts. You are trying to argue that it’s wrong to try and stop something bad because other people might choose to do something bad. That does not work. I am not morally responsible for the choices of others. If the Mormons or other conservative Christians decide to make their own bigot scouting organizations, that is not my responsibility. That is their choice, not mine. My choice is to do what I can to try and stop the existing organization from being bigoted.
If people were responsible for things that other people chose, then any action I make could be immoral simply because it resulted in someone else making a choice. If I shooed a butterfly, which caused it to fly by an endangered bird that swooped and got it, leading to someone being able to more easily shoot that bird, I am not responsible for the death of that bird. My action was not immoral, but their choice was.
As far as I am concerned, it is wrong for me to support the BSA as long as they continue their bigoted policies. It is right for me to try and stop them from having those policies so that non-bigoted people can feel comfortable sending their kids. My responsibility is not to make sure that the bigots no longer have the choice to be bigoted.
As for seeing other scouts that aren’t bigoted? Scouts isn’t the entire entire world. They’ll still meet LGBT people outside of scouts. I don’t think those people need to be scouts for people to see they aren’t so bad after all, let alone part of the same scouting organization.
I find it very odd how many people are defending BSA’s stance while they themselves disagree with it. I for one am happy that GSUSA has given parents a choice, and I’d love to see BSA have to get better. No denomination of Christianity is going to make a bigger scouting organization, let alone be the ones that represent the US and what it stands for.
Which, in fact, they already have – as several of us mentioned earlier in this now-lengthy thread, Trail Life USA was formed in 2013, directly in response to the BSA’s changes.
As has been noted repeatedly, the conservative Christians already HAVE created their own less tolerant organization (Trail Life). However, no, this separate organization doesn’t mean they stop being able to force bigotry on those who are not part of their religion. Trail Life accepts boys of any faith or no faith at all; some troops are more restrictive, but for the organization as a whole, pretty much the only absolute is “no gays” (or bi/trans/other non-heterosexual).
That means that if a troop moves from BSA to Trail Life (as hundreds already have), then the members of that troop will move right along with them, or find a new troop, or leave scouting. If XYZ Church’s troop (which currently has both church members and non-members within it), moves, why do you believe that the non-church boys within the troop won’t by default move right along with it?
Remember that for many parents, whether or not a troop accepts gays is NOT a key decision point; their kids who are interested in scouting will join whatever troop is convenient or that kiddo’s friends belong to or that otherwise meets requirements. If the convenient troop happens to be part of Trail Life, then kids who are not part of XYZ’s congregation at all will be exposed to Trail Life’s own ideology: “homosexuality is sinful and immoral, as is any sexual activity outside of the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”
This presumption is based on recent history: the overwhelming majority of existing troops are sponsored by churches, particularly churches that are more theologically conservative. If a new organization is to arise, then there is going to have be a wave of sponsorship interest from groups that have not historically shown much interest; on what do you base your belief that this wave will materialize? That has nothing to do with members and parents and volunteers, but with what organizations are willing to be sponsors.
No, my argument is that the best way to ensure lasting progress is to push the organization (which has already shown a willingness to change) gradually to continue those changes, rather than issue ultimatums that invite backlash. Even ten years ago, a gay child was not welcome in the Boy Scouts, period. Today, they are welcome in many but not all troops. That by itself is a sea change, but it is a sea change some in this thread are unable (or perhaps merely unwilling) to appreciate. No, it’s not far enough, but hearts and minds are not changed overnight.
You fail to appreciate that many non-bigoted people already DO feel comfortable sending their kids to BSA, and some of them even to Trail Life, not because they share the bigotry but because that’s simply not an important issue for them. People who have no personal animus about LGBTQ issues don’t necessarily think that such issues need to be THE defining issue. There is a huge mass of people in this country who don’t base their life choices on which groups or companies or individuals support or oppose LGBTQ issues; they are willing to compromise or ignore those issues to focus on ones that matter more to them. Those people, the parents and troop volunteers, are precisely the people we need to be educating and interacting with and pushing to be grass-roots advocates from within, to get them to understand why this issue matters.
Instead, your approach is targeted at the sponsoring organizations, which I think is entirely the wrong target if the goal is to effect meaningful change.
I think the failure in your reasoning is that you think major social change is achieved only by changing hearts and minds. Of course that’s part of it. But there will always be diehard bigots whose minds will never be changed, and marginalizing bigotry, not accommodating it, is both the moral choice and the pragmatic path to social progress.
You marginalize bigotry by changing the hearts and minds of a majority of the target population.
In this instance, how do you think you are marginalizing bigotry, when your efforts seem to give strength and encouragement to the bigots?
Most people in the Boy Scouts are not bigots. However, they operate within a series of constraints, the most notable of which is that a huge chunk of their funding and sponsorship comes from conservative Christian churches. If you demand that every troop in the BSA be fully accommodating immediately, you are essentially demanding that conservative Christian churches change their theology, which ain’t gonna happen anytime in the near term.
The practical result is likely to be that the conservative Christians take their toys and go home, either ceasing sponsorship of any Scouting activity at all or withdrawing to Trail Life and its ilk (we’ve already seen that with the Mormons and some of the evangelical churches, and that was only when they had to share the BSA umbrella with tolerant troops, not actually be tolerant themselves). Without their money, the BSA will be a shadow of its former self, if indeed it survives at all, and that could well end up leaving Trail Life and its ilk as the dominant Scouting organizations in the US for young men. At that point, bigotry isn’t marginalized; it is the majority. You will have traded an imperfect organization that is willing to allow troops to decide tolerance for an organization that demands obedience to an intolerant and homophobic philosophy, and I fail to see how that advances social progress.
What do YOU think will happen when conservative churches are compelled to decide whether or not to tolerate LGBTQ men and boys using the church’s facilities, monies, and name? I think they’ll decide no; what are your reasons for thinking otherwise? (or do you think the conservative churches will leave but other civic organizations will step up to fill the gap?)
Yeah, however many ways you try to paraphrase “go slow” on basic human decency, it’s bogus. You don’t fight bigotry by not fighting it.