Shriek! Groan!
First, to the OP. I feel the BSA is being self-righteous in their attitude, and probably feels like it’s (a) “defending our boys against those pederasts that everyone knows gay men are” :rolleyes: and (b) “setting an example so that boys tempted to be gay can change before it’s too late.” {Insert smiley pointing to rolleyes smiley and saying “Me too”} Anyone who wants to go into detail what’s wrong with those two points is more than welcome to; just realize that I’m attributing an attitude to them, not alleging it myself!
Second, the BSA is an association which you can choose to join or not…a private group protected by the First Amendment. The fact that they have decided to exclude out gays is their privilege. What gets to me is the idea that for over 99% of American boys, it’s the one option for the sort of things that Scouting brings to a boy’s life. The alternatives that do exist are local and barely getting off the ground. As such, I personally feel it should be held to a higher standard than the Foursquare Gospel True Believers Apostolic Church or the International Order of Odd Fellows, where alternative choices are a dime a dozen.
Vestal is putting forth a fairly common assertion concerning the validity of the Bible, and one held by the vast majority of Christians. Factually, he has a few small errors: what the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve is a few O.T. books and commentaries on them; aside from quotations and a couple of papyrus scraps, the oldest extant Bibles are 6th century. I think I’d concur that they are fairly accurate.
However, terminology is touchy. The Biblical usage “know” for “have sex with” is classic in this regard. If Vestal Blue knows precisely what St. Paul meant by “arsenokaitos” he is several steps ahead of every competent Biblical scholar of any tradition. (In fact, not a few competent scholars have thought that Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was homosexuality – that he was gay and self-loathing because it was wrong under the Law, making him an unregenerate sinner, and hence rejoicing in his freedom from the Law in Christ but still feeling guilt for it – without digging up old problems, he was, in short, Snark.)
So I’m not prepared to make any suppositions about what the Bible may have to say about the moral capacity of gays. For me, they have the same problem the rest of us do – to live a life according to the moral standards they feel right for themselves, aided by what authority they accept as proper guidance in setting their own standards.
Having argued against “the homosexual agenda” terminology in the past, I’m going to do an about face, Hastur, and say that there is one: a set of goals shared by virtually all gay people.
[li]The freedom to live and work without persecution[/li][li]The freedom to have a normal sex life without being entrapped and arrested[/li][li]The freedom to marry the person they love, and have that marriage accepted in law as giving them the same rights as any other married person vis-a-vis the spouse[/li][li]The right to have the benefits they receive on a job extended to their chosen family (spouse and any children) exactly as straight people’s are[/li]…etc.
And I feel that any right-thinking individual would have no problem supporting that agenda.
Falcon, I have not yet gotten the alert you said you sent me; I happened on this thread and saw it.
Matt, that sounds like a useful new thread. What exactly are your problems with Christian belief – not the attitudes of particular self-designated Christians, but the doctrine as you learned it? Can we discuss it?
). But I certainly do not support “gay rights” because any right given specifically to any group is implicitly at the cost of another group (this article “Equal Rights, not Gay Rights” at