The Boy Scouts are likely to learn on the legal front something the American government learned in Vietnam: declared, open wars are easier to win and peace to be achieved than insurgency and guerrilla fighting, which never seems to end.

Monday, July 17, 2000

The Boy Scouts are likely to learn on the legal front something the American government learned in Vietnam: declared, open wars are easier to win and peace to be achieved than insurgency and guerrilla fighting, which never seems to end. Scouts recently won before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled they could dismiss gays from leadership positions. In reaction, however, gay activists are attacking again but on different grounds and with different weapons. When gay activists use threats, intimidation and institutional assignation to further their own political goals, they betray themselves as being obsessed with their own political goals and uninterested in Scouting, human rights, the public welfare or morality.

The highest court in the land has ruled it unconstitutional and illegal and, therefore, un-American for the Boy Scouts of America to be forced to accept as adult leaders those men who violate the group’s private moral code. Boy Scouts, the court found, is not a public accommodation, which is obliged to serve everyone without reference to such things as sexual orientation. It is a private organization that can set its own standards and rules.

Forget the law and the court, some gay activists and ACLU people are saying. They have set about to intimidate corporations and foundations to withhold funds from the Boy Scouts. If the contributors don’t fall in line with the scheme, the civic-minded organizations will suffer all manner of subversion from the gays. Lacking adequate funds, these gays hope Scouts will be forced to accept and promote gays. Once this happens, they can fall back into complete uninterest in Scouting and move on to other targets of opportunity.

From its founding, BSA has pledged itself and asked both its Scouts and Scouters (adult leaders) to pledge themselves to be "morally straight" and "morally pure." When the Scout Oath, the Scout Laws and other ethical principles were formulated in the first decade of the last century, the specific and immediate reference was of course to heterosexual feelings and activity. Scouts taught boys to remain sexually restrained until marriage but marriage was anticipated for most. It was then, of course, unnecessary to qualify it as bisexual. They taught the boys to remain sexually faithful within marriage, and this has been the expectation for married Scouters.

James Dale and his supporters, then, disingenuously assert that Scouts never stipulated opposition to homosexuality to be "a core value" of Scouting. Dale was plaintiff in the New Jersey suit, but now makes a career of attacking the organization he claimed to love and says he wants to help. Whereas he presented himself as a role model to Scouts, he has become both hero to and pawn of an extreme element of the gay activists. These, of course, do not and never have cared about the welfare and effectiveness of scouting but are selfishly pursuing their own political goals.

When I was trained as a Scoutmaster by the professional Scouters, an absolute prohibition was leveled against any Scouter ever taking boys camping without the presence of another adult. On those few occasions when a man neglected the rule, the officials came down hard on him. Obviously, that was not to keep us from running off from the boys and finding a woman. From the start, Scout officials sought to ensure no homosexual ever became a leader and quietly dismissed any of whom they learned. In point of fact, formal dismissal was not necessary, because those men had the decency to leave quietly There is no question in my mind that the Boy Scouts of America have always strongly required that homosexuals have no part in scouting.

That it might appear, in recent court arguments, to be a core value is due only to people such as Dale isolating the single issue and focusing it out of proportion to the larger body of moral issues.

Dale’s lawyers are correct in pointing out that Scouts has never been characterized as distinctly anti-gay. It has, in fact, been reasonably tolerant when left alone, but such challenges as his forced its lawyers to isolate the issue of homosexuality and focus on it disproportionate to Scouting’s overall moral code. In short, gay activists going for broke has forced Scouts to become less tolerant.

Despite the highest court in the land declaring Boy Scouts within their private rights, the gay activists are not satisfied that justice has been served and now refuse to accept what is finally declared to be legal. This is not fair play and it is not the American way. They praise enforcement of anti-discrimination laws that protect gays, but they spurn those that protect people who disagree with them. Such gays are inexcusably intolerant.

If gay activists could show Scouting were harmful to boys, I would join the opponents in getting Boy Scouts to change. I can, however, neither support nor respect a self-serving, irresponsible insurgency that dishonestly goes about destroying one of this country’s greatest institutions for its own political purposes.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays