I was involved in the Scouts organization for a number of years and have quite a few fond memories of the organization. I stopped going to Boyscout meetings after moving to Dallas and discovered that they really didn’t do the whole “camping” and outdoorsy stuff there. Anyway, I don’t remember “morally straight” from the Boy Scout Handbook to have anything to do with homosexuality. In fact, I don’t remember homosexuality being mentioned anywhere. So far as religion went, yeah, you were supposed to believe in deity or have a religion of some sort. You could be Buddhist for example, and, once, I saw a merit badge that reflected Buddhism, I think.
Anyway, I see where you’re coming from. Like it or not, the higher ups in the Scouting organization have changed it into a different entity than the one I remember. It’s too bad.
There was a scandal in Oregon with an LDS sponsored Boy Scout troop. Their article mentioned that some huge percent of Boy Scout troops are sponsored by the Mormons. Here:
While 'm sure the Mormon church is very supportive of scouting in Mormon areas to claim that there is some Mormon cabal directing scouting is asinine. Boy Scouting is all over the US and Mormons comprise just over 2% of the US population. Your “control” hypothesis is insane relative to the entire US.
The heavy Mormon influence is news to me. When I lived in Salt Lake, it was no secret that many troops were organized around the Wards and Stakes, but so was everything else, it seemed. Certainly where I grew up, in New Jersey, Mormons were a distinct minority.
Despite having many Mormons in key positions (if that’s true), the Boy Scouts still isn’t a religious organization, unless they’ve made some fundamental changes in their charter. They have a plethora of religious badges and programs representing most faiths:
It still bugs me that they’re anti-agnostic and anti-Atheist, so I suppose they’re “religious” in the sense that they promote religion over unbelief, but they don’t support any one faith.
Good. Call me asinine then. Each local troop of Boy Scounts is managed by the “charter organization” – the religious, civic, or social group or school that sponsors them and holds their charter from the national organization, and whch names a local committee of interested adults. They are accountable to Councils and Council Executives, who oversee Scouting in a multicounty regonal area – e.g, Tidewater Virginia, the Inland Empire, the Upper Peninsula. And they in turn are accountable to the National Executve,
The National Executive is a self-perpetuating body which names replacements to itself. Over several decades the membership has become largely conservative Mormons interested in Scouting, who have named other conservative Mormons who share their perspective to vacancies, etc., and who have set national policies in line with Mormon moral standards. This can be checked out. It may not be the nefarious conspiracy it’s denouced as, but it certainly isn’t someone’s imagination.
The LDS Church (the Mormons) have the Boy Scouts as their official boy’s youth organization, and it is, I believe, the only non-LDS organization that is an official part of LDS programming.
What this means is that each LDS ward (parish) sponsors a Boy and Cub scout troops and all active LDS boys of scouting age are scouts and regularly participate.
Because all young boys in the LDS church are boy scouts, their membership in BSA is disproportionate to the general LDS population. Although the percentages reported vary (as the stories linked above show), probably somewhere between 25% and 50% of scouts and/or troops are LDS. Also, with expanding church membership and large family size, the LDS scouts are one of the few areas where BSA membership is growing, as contrasted with the general national decline in interest in scouting.
The other major factor is that the LDS church, being centrally controlled, has the ability to remove the Boy Scouts from their programming on a church-wide basis. What this means is that if the church hierarchy decides that the BSA is inconsistent with the LDS church’s teachings, it can replace the BSA with some directly church-sponsored group (e.g., start up its own purely LDS scouting program). This would instantly remove a quarter to a half of the BSA’s membership, with the resultant decline in revenues and program participation.
As such, not only have LDS members taken leadership roles at the BSA national level, the church as a whole has the ability to say to the national organization that if it doesn’t take positions consistent with church doctrine, the church will leave the Scouts, which could be a fatal financial and organizational blow to the BSA.
As such, though the LDS church may not directly control the BSA, the church has the ability to indirectly but effectively control matters of BSA doctrine like the requirement for belief and prohibition against homosexuality.
Well, color me educumated on the Mormons and LDS. I was very active in Boy Scouts as a youngster in the 60s (before finding other, more “interesting” recreational activities) and had no contact at with Mormons in the Scouts. It was definitely religious, but not Mormon religious.
This was also denial of cert of an interlocutory appeal on a threshold question of standing…the case itself is (and was) still pending, the Ninth Circuit having certified certain questions of law to the California Supreme Court. There’s a decent chance* that cert will get granted when it’s all said and done. This isn’t particularly newsworthy or meaningful, IMHO.
*At least, as much of a decent chance as there ever is that cert will be granted, since it so rarely happens in any case.
I’ve been looking for information on the Boy Scout/LDS connection on the Interwebs, but it’s not very enlightening – an awful lot is unsupported and seems bigoted. It’s certainly not the sort of thing I’d cite to buttress my case.
Evidently Penn and teller did a piece on this, but I don’t get Showtime, and the descriptions aren’t much help. There seem to be some newspaper reports, but they’re more concerned with joint LDS/BSA suits about abuse.
Is there a reliable cite on this LDS domination of the Boy Scouts?
With that, I am a Scoutmaster in the West. The LDS group is strong, and very supportive of Scouting in general. However, I do not feel their influence except when at meetings at the local Stake where I have to bring my own coffee.
Their strength in numbers does mean that their anti-gay bigotry is strong, but that feeling is far from unique to Mormon troops. My Troop covers multiple religions (Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim) and we have plenty of anti-gay parents around in my unit. I have stated that I look forward to the day when “local control” can be put in place, allowing each Charter Organization (The VA Hall, church, PTA, etc.) to determine if someone gay is morally straight.
Losing the lease at Balboa is sad to me, simply because it is a place that my in-laws spent years at when they were Scouts. The Scouting groups battles on these subjects is slowly pushing Scouting into fringes - and that is a bad thing. People like me are trying to reach out and help youth, and we are trying to make changes from the inside, but we fight both reactionaries on the inside and the people on the outside who delight in the Scouts losing. I am sometimes stuck between bigots and bullies.
I’d come across the first one already. I hadn’t noticed that it cited a *Rolling Stone[/i article, though.
The others don’t address the supposed LDS takeover of the BSA – the LDS one is from the group that would be doing the taking over, though, if this is true.
The third is interesting – the LDS Church sponsors about as many troops as the rest of the religious groups combined. But the second-largest is the Methodists, which is surprising. Based on my own experience (and what many of the anti-LDS sites are saying), I’d expect that Catholics to be the next biggest group.
the LDS dominance, though, is pretty clear from sheer numbers.
My experience (again, from the 60s) was that the Boy Scouts were a largely Protestant organization. As a Catholic (at the time) myself, I generally felt like I was in the minority. Not discriminated against, but just that we Catholics were a much smaller group. Of course, even today, Catholics are only about 25% of the US, so although they are the largest single church, they certainly aren’t a majority.
So, I don’t think the Catholic Church made much of an effort, if at all, to be a force in the Boy Scouts. Probably a good thing they didn’t…
