So let me get this straight (pun intended). You want the freedom to exclude gay people from your ranks; but you don’t want OTHER people to have the freedom to not give you their money. Is that it? Can someone explain to me the logic here, 'cause I don’t see it.
The issue is that the Boy Scouts are excluded as an optionfor State Employees to donate to. This is from:
http://www.state.ct.us/csec/general/index.html
The bottom line is that Connecticut State Employees who want to donate to the Boy Scouts can not use this vehicle, because the state has taken them off the list.
I don’t see a hypocracy issue here.
And gay men are excluded from being leaders in the Scouts. Sure it hypocrisy. The Boy Scouts insist they have the right to choose who to affiliate with. Why doesn’t the CSEC have the right to choose who to affiliate with by choosing where they support?
Is there no other way that a Connecticut state employee could donate to the Boy Scouts of America if they so chose to? I mean, does it have to be done through paycheck garnishments?
Scouts was the best thing about my teenhood. It really sucks that the powers that be decided to be divisive rather than inclusive. It’s very un-Scoutlike, believe it or not.
All of the organizations that I support are not options through my payroll deduction plan. Therefore, I write a check. Easy.
This is just the latest in a long line of attempts by the BS to have it both ways. They demand the right to exclude gay and atheist members (and granted they have always required a belief in a supreme being but they only very recently started claiming that they had a long-standing practice of barring gays)–which right they secured through the flimsiest of pretexts from SCOTUS–but then they also demand the right to feed from the public trough in the form of being included on charitable giving forms, sweetheart lease agreements, exlusive land use privileges and so on. Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all from the highest of the highest leader to the littlest Tiger Cub. Either open your doors or don’t expect handouts.
Does Connecticut have the power to exclude the Boy Scouts from this program, based only on the Boy Scout’s exercising a right that is constitutionally protected?
I don’t see the hypocrisy here. The Boy Scouts’s exclusionary policy with regard to homosexuals has been affirmed by the Supreme Court. They have a constitutional right to limit access to leadership positions to non-homosexuals. The Boy Scouts feel that exercising that constitutional right is meaningless if the government may punish them for it. Approved charities on Connecticut’s list include PETA and the National Abortion Rights Action League; limiting the Boy Scouts’ access smacks disturbingly of the government choosing organizations based on the content of their message.
You may disagree, of course, but the Boy Scouts’ position is not internally self-contradictory. It’s not hypocritical. You may feel it’s misguided - or, indeed, outright wrong, as the Second Circuit did. But wrong does not mean hypocritical.
- Rick
Well, it’s a little more complicated than it at first appears.
The problem (to the extent there’s a problem) is that the State of Connecticut has apparently decided that some kind of discrimination is okay, but another kind of discrimination is not okay. Specifically, it has decided that it is okay for a charity to discriminate in the provision of services (for example, providing services only or primarily to gay and lesbian people, or only to people of a given ethnicity), but it is not okay for a charity to discrminate in membership or employment practices. In other words (and using a totally made-up example), you can set up a charity to provide outreach services to, say, Hmong people, but you can’t insist on hiring only Hmong people to provide the services. The question is, why is one form of discrimination okay when the other form is not?
Furthermore, the Court held that in the wake of the Dale case, the BSA’s discriminatory actions with regard to homosexuals had to be considered a protected exercise of its (the BSA’s) constitutional freedom of association. So how does Connecticut justify discriminating against the BSA for the exercise of this constitutionally-protected right? In other words, is it okay for the government to discrminate against private discriminators, when the private discrimination is constitutionally protected?
As it happens, I think the judicial decisions were correct – and it is worth noting that the BSA lost at every level. The bottom line is that while an organization may lawfully choose to discriminate, it cannot expect the government to assist it in doing so. But for reasons set forth in the opinion, these are not as easy of legal questions as they might at first appear.
It is also important to note that Connecticut has a specific law to protect the rights of gay people (unlike many other states), which provided a basis for the State to argue that including the BSA in the charitable givin campaign would cause the state itself to violate the law. This is not an argument the state could have made in the absence of this gay rights law, so the decision might have been different if the case had originated in a state lacking such a law.
Here is a link to a longer article on the case, and here is a link to U.S. Court of Appeals (Second Circuit). To find the decision itself and read it, go to “Decisions,” then to “Search All,” and put in “BSA” (with quotes) as a search term. It will pull up one document, which is the one in question: BSA v. Wyman, U.S. Ct. of Appeals (2nd Cir.) 02-9000 (July 9, 2003).
And further to BRICKER’s point, the Court apparently held that approving charities like PETA and NARAL while banning the BSA was acceptable because those organizations were not shown to discriminate in membership and employment, which the BSA admits that it does. Again, this raises the question of why discriminating in the provision of services (or moral message) is okay, but discrminating in membership and employment is not.
Far be it from me to deny anybody the right to rant and rail against the ignoble oppressor and dehumanizers of this world, but I’ve been noticing that a disproportionate amount of the oppression fighting bandwith on this board seems to be occupied with gay issues.
Religious groups are committing oppressive acts, Republicans are committing Repressive acts, Boy Scouts are committing repressive acts.
I’m a supporter of gay rights, and I’m sympathetic to the difficulties and injustices encountered.
Yet at the same time, I’m noticing that there’s not a lot of black people cataloguing each injustice as it occurs against them, and blaming whole groups for it.
I’m not seeing a lot of Jews launching threads on anti-semitism.
I’m not seeing a lot of threads by women, about being repressed. or the dangers and humiliations they face.
It would seem to me that it’s pretty difficult to hide it if you’re black. You’re pretty much a walking target for bigots. Women have a tough time too. But nobody has to know whether somebody is gay unless they tell them and reveal the fact.
This is not to say that gay people should hide their identity, but just an observation that their identity is not as readily apparent, and they are typically not as ready a target as say, black people or women.
I imagine a black person must encounter prejudice and suspicion every single day.
Yet, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thread by a black person, decrying injustice and attacking an entire group.
There are so many groups out there oppressing black people and women, you think they’d get their own threads from time to time.
You’d think there would be a lot of generalizations and attacks thrown by blacks against whites, Southerners, Country Clubs, the Police, etc. etc.
I’ve never seen one.
Yet, I see countless threads about gay issues telling me how terrible Catholics are, how terrible the Boy Scouts are, how terrible Republicans are.
Now, as a Republican Catholic ex-Boy scout who is sympathetic and supportive of gay rights, I have to admit that I’m starting to get just a little bit fucking miffed.
As far as I know, not a single one of my Republican friends is a homophobe, nor a single one of my Catholic friends, nor are any of the ex-boyscouts of my acquaintance homophobic. Certainly I would credit them each and every one as being a cut above the average as regards their tolerance, but then if they weren’t, they would not be my friends or continuing acquaintances.
At the very same time, I know of several gay people on these boards, some of which I admire and like and consider friends, who do not share this tolerance. They will freely generalize about Catholics, Republicans, Boy Scouts, or whatever target they feel fit.
They seem to be consistently aiming at their targets generally and with wide dispersion and with little discrimination.
It kind of pisses me off.
While I don’t wish to belittle any aspect of discrimination that occurs, I find myself wondering if this is not perhaps a little histrionic.
It seems to me that there is something a little bit mean going on. As if being Gay is an excuse to attack Catholics, Republicans, Boy Scouts or what have you in a general fashion, as if it’s deserved.
Now just two weeks ago tonight my second daughter was born. This event makes me think about the kind of person I want to be, the kind of father, the kind of example.
I run and I work out every day because I am a coward. I spend a lot of my life in fear, and it’s a peculiar kind of fear. I want to be stong and able so I am up to any eventualities that may occur, so that my children will not suffer for my weakness.
Foolish, I know. The emergencies that face us are never the ones that we prepare for. In this day and age it’s doubtful that strength and endurance will stop anything bad that’s on it’s way. Nonetheless it feels right. Similarly, I try to prepare myself mentally so that I am the right kind of person to have and raise children. An example and a good father. A good person.
It seems to me pretty basic that if I want to be such a person, and teach tolerance, nonjudgementalness, and equality to my children as inherently good and deserving of all people that I should make a point of attacking homophobia when I see it, or prejudice against race, or religion, and most importantly for me, gender. I worry about what it’s going to like for my daughters growing up as females. To me, it seems they’re second class to some, and the world is not apt to treat them fairly.
They will have to deal with it as we all work to make it better, as will black people, and jews, and Muslims, and anybody else, including gays. There are a lot of people out there exercising their right to be judgemental and intolerant pricks.
The fact that somebody is doing it against you is not an excuse to do it against anybody else.
As a gay person, I think you have legitimate cause to be upset concerning the Boy Scouts policies as regards to Gays.
Similarly, I think there are legitimate gripes against aspects of organized religion and political groups.
These things do not translate into legitimate gripes against the Boy Scouts, Catholics, or Republicans in general, and they do not excuse such sentiments or behavior.
Scylla, I’m sympathetic to your statements. However, in the present thread you’re the only one to mention Republicans or Catholics. I support your concerns about generalization, but would be happier if the discussion stuck to the matter at hand. I think your point is worth discussing, and perhaps requires its own thread.
Fuck off Scylla.
The fact that somebody is doing it against you is not an excuse to do it against anybody else.
Well said, Scylla.
Let me elaborate.
When we complain about the Republican Party, it’s for good reason. It’s your President, your party platform plank, your Speaker of the House, your Senate President, your Party Whips who are out there championing anti-gay policies. It’s your party that elevates Santorum and Delay and ignores Senator John Warner. Your President who nominates the likes of Jay S. Bybee and Pryor to federal benches.
If the Pope and the College of Cardinals are declaring “Homosexual acts are against nature’s laws,” then it’s justified if we complain about the Catholic Church.
If you pulled your head out of your ass long enough to get some fresh air, you’d notice this rant, and other rants against the Boy Scouts is about the homophobic policies; not about individual Scouts. You know it and your complaining of generalization is dishonest. I suspect, given your position on the Big Brothers issue, that you agree with the Scouts’ policy too.
It’s not generalization and it is accurate. You are no friend to gay rights. And I think you are a liar when you claim you are.
It’s the height of irony to come into this thread and make accusations of generalizations and histronics. It was clearly focused about this issue and had no generalizations. Most other threads on anti-gay discrimination are similarly focused on specific targets, usually triggered by specific comments, legistlation or legal action. Just because you happen to share the labels Republican, Scout and Catholic is an unfortunate coincidence. Or perhaps not.
You want to claim to be sympathetic of gay rights, then you damned well better prove it. Work to get Bush out of the White House. Work to end the stupid push for the amendment. Work to repeal DOMA. Work to end “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”.
You’ll have to ask monstro or JuanitaTech why they don’t rant more. However, their lack of ranting doesn’t preclude those of us who complain rightfully about the discrimination we see.
On preview:
SnoopyFan: When was the last time you heard of Gay people cruising the parking lots of churches and beating the people when they come out? Is Barney Frank pushing an amendment to prohibit fundamentalist christians from marrying? Has Troy Perry called heterosexuals a “perversion of nature”?
There is no tit-for-tat going on.
How the fuck is complaining about anti-gay discrimination “doing the same thing”? That’s idiotic to suggest. Does it hurt to be that stupid?
This isn’t quite true. In many quarters, if one doesn’t demonstrate heterosexuality, homosexuality is assumed.
I’m as closeted as closeted can be at work, except I don’t put up any hetero “front” like fake family pictures at my desk. I am not effeminate, a “flamer,” particularly stylish, particularly political, or [insert stereotype here]. Yet as a 36-year-old never-married male who apparently doesn’t date, I’m assumed (correctly) to be gay. This is fine, but please don’t tell me I could conceal my sexuality if I wanted to. NOT expressing a desire for women, in an adult male, equals homosexuality in much of our society.
Scylla, I like you a lot, but I think you are a poor empathizer. Try never mentioning your wife or children again, and see what people think. You really have no idea how the other half lives.
The Boy Scouts issue matters little to me, but they do seem to want it both ways. They want to be a private organization when it comes to membership. But they position themselves as quasi-public when it comes to government handouts. I’d like to see ALL government-encouraged fundraising to disappear, so it’s moot to me. Whether BSA can stay financially afloat, regardless of their membership requirements, should be only their own lookout.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Homebrew *
Let me elaborate.
I wish you hadn’t started with a “fuck you,” then. It’s the kind of thing that makes it difficult for me to treat you evenly. How can you expect me to give your arguments respect and consider them carefully in the context of such a preface?
**
This is precisely the kind of histrionics and generalizations that led me to post here. It looks to me like you’re just pissing on these people and things generally. You act as if this is the defining characteristic of the Republican party and that it is unique to the Republican party. This is simply not so. Lots of Democrats signed DOMA. Clinton championed “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Why is your issue with Republicans? Shouldn’t it be with homophobes?
**
Why?
The Catholic Church is more than this one issue which you find fault in (as do I)
My issue is with the conclusion. Your issue is with the Church as a whole, as if this conclusion defined the entire existance of the Church as a whole. Same goes in your response to the Republican party.
You are picking single aspects of large and compex things and defining the whole by those single aspects.
It seems to me that this is exactly the type of behavior that you decry when it is directed at gays. Seeing as that is the case why do you choose to direct it at other groups?
That’s not precisely true. It looks to me like you are complaining about the hypocrisy of the Boy Scouts organization in general because of this one single aspect. It looks to me like an excuse to rag on the Boy Scouts. Bricker and Jodi have pointed out the subtleties of the issue, yet this has brought forth no change in your original thoughts or conclusions. You have not addressed them. The fact that you have not bothered to address them suggests to me that that’s not really the issue for you.
It’s foolish of you to guess when you can ask. But again, I don’t think you really care what my stance on this issue is. I think you just prefer to paint me as a homophobe and dismiss what I say on those grounds and those grounds alone, just as you have dismissed Republicans, the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts.
It is precisely this type of behavior that I have posted to take issue with.
Again, it’s this kind of pronouncement that I find so damn wrong. You’re assuming a power and an athority that you don’t have. If you don’t like people what you are, how do you get off telling me what I am.
You’re entitled to your opinion.
Says who under what athority? You are not the arbiter of what is right and wrong. When I look at your little list it appears that you are trying to bribe me. It’s as if you’re saying “If you don’t do these things you’re a homophobe.”
And this is yet another good example. You’re personal opinion of George Bush is not a gay rights stance. And it’s a little bit crazy of you to presume to tell me that it is.
I’ve thought about that one quite a bit. I think it’s a mistake to call it a “push.” It’s really a threat, one I think very few people actually want to go through with.
Wasn’t that instituted by a Democrat? Do you have the same contempt for Clinton that you do for Bush? I don’t think Bush has as of yet done anything as bad as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” so I guess you have a lot more contempt for Clinton on the issue of gay rights then you do for Bush, right?
**
I see your point. The kind of discrimination I was thinking about was the walking down the street type of discrimination, not the people that know you, type.
Wow, Scylla, you took all of this awfully personally. I guaren-fucking-tee you that if you had never posted, nobody would have thought “Oh, the boy scouts don’t allow Gays in, Scylla must be homophobic. He better get in here to defend his honor.”
Re: Scylla’s post.
If you have noticed a disproportionate amount of complaining about oppression by gays and lesbians, it’s possible that this is because, in some sections of the American society at least, homophobia seems to be one of the few remaining “acceptable” prejudices. This is not to say, of course, that racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism have been stamped out–far from it–but only that such bigotry nowdays is more commmonly disguised behind more benign language.
Despite the success of “Will & Grace” and “Queer Eye,” however, homophobia is still open and common practice in many parts of the mainstream media. For example, i recently read an article in Harper’s magazine about Clear Channel which, with about 1200 stations, is the biggest radio company in the nation. The journalist noted frequent homophobic taunting, abuse and ridicule on Clear Channel stations. Upon confronting a Clear Channel executive about the matter, he was told, essentially, that Clear Channel was just giving the audience what it wanted, even though the executive conceded that similar invective would probably be unacceptable if directed against a racial minority.
I realize that this is rather anecdotal information, and i don’t claim that it’s indicative of all American society by any means. But i also have noticed that people who wouldn’t dream of using a term like “nigger” or “kike” are happy tossing around epithets such as “homo” or “faggot.”
YMMV
Re: Bricker’s post.
I guess it depends the extent to which you draw the line between moral and legal issues. While it is true that the BSA’s attempt to defend a position that has been affirmed by the Supreme Court is a logical one, your claim that there is no hypocrisy involved only really stands up if we accept that the government is a qualitatively different entity from any other, and that discrimination by a government (such as Connecticut) is morally less acceptable than discrimination by private entities. While this distinction may hold true in law, for many people the moral distinction is not so clear, particularly when the government’s own discrimination is a response to discrimination on the part of the organization. On those grounds, i can see why people might accuse the BSA of hypocrisy.