Fresh off making people’s eyes roll with a ban on water-gun play fights, the Boy Scouts of America has found an even better way to lose members: propose that homosexuals be allowed to serve as Boy Scout troop leaders.
Wow, what could possibly go wrong?
The suggestion came from Boy Scouts of America (BSA) president Robert Gates, a former defense secretary with a history of taking the offense against tradition. As Pentagon chief he effected the elimination of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, thus allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military; and placed female officers aboard cramped submarines. Now he’s telling the BSA they must get with the times, saying at the organization’s annual meeting in Atlanta, “We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.” My, what spirit. Had the Founding Fathers shared it, we’d still be British subjects.
The problem is that “the world as it is” is detached from reality and reason. And here’s reality: What Gates proposes — in the name of equality for homosexuals — amounts to preferential treatment for them. After all, if having homosexuals as Boy Scout troop leaders poses no problems, why not allow normal men to be Girl Scout troop leaders? What’s the difference? Are homosexuals immune to sexual temptation?
By essentially saying they’d trust homosexuals with Boy Scouts but not normal men with Girl Scouts, Gates and his fellow travelers have gone beyond equality — they’re implying that homosexuals are superior to straight men. And by saying they’ll ignore the danger of sexual temptation with homosexuals in the BSA while holding normal men to the traditional standard, they’re effecting a double standard that favors homosexuals.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen such bias, either. When Gene Robinson left his wife and children to be with his homosexual lover, the decision was not only called “brave” by some, but he was rewarded years later by being elected an Episcopalian bishop in 2003. Now, question: If a straight man left his family and violated his marriage vows to be with his mistress, would he be called brave or a dog? Would he be elected bishop or likened to Beelzebub? In both cases the men are attracted to someone else more than to their wives. But in one case it’s called adultery — in the other it’s called liberation.
(By the way, Robinson just can’t help being brave; last year he announced he was “divorcing” his “husband.”)
What’s going on here? Disconnected from Truth and governed by emotion, we now operate not on principles but prejudice. It’s not what you do — it’s what you are. If you’re a white male college professor who renders a politically incorrect analysis of racial differences, your university condemns you and says your remarks have no place in “civil discourse”; if you’re a black female college professor with a criminal record who taunted a white rape victim and made vulgar, bigoted comments, your university defends your right to free speech and proceeds with its plan to retain your services.
So we’d never risk letting straight men take Girl Scouts on camping trips, but homosexuals and Boy Scouts? Hey, if you want to make an omelet of so-called Equality™, you have to break a few eggs. Of course, leftists will say that homosexuality and pedophilia are entirely different phenomena — pedophiles are a distinct group — and that most child molesters are heterosexual. Yet the contradiction invariably goes unnoticed. If pedophiles are a group unto themselves, how can you label any of them “heterosexual”? And if most are the latter, it follows that some of the remainder would be homosexual. Ergo, there are homosexual child molesters.
Yet there’s another factor. Many scouts are in fact adolescents (onset of male puberty occurs on average at age 11). And if it’s not unfathomable that a normal man could find a developing teen girl a temptation, is it radical to assume a homosexual could find teens boys so? Note that history provides many examples of men routinely taking child brides (Islam’s Mohammed comes to mind); likewise, from ancient Athens and Sparta to today’s “chickenhawks,” homosexuality has long been intertwined with pederasty.
Continuing with the double standards, leftists believe homosexuals are being singled out by the BSA. But think about it: An organization has no more way of knowing a person is a homosexual than that he’s an adulterer or fornicator — assuming he keeps his behavior private. And would the BSA accept an “open” adulterer or fornicator, someone who wore his anomalous sexual behavior on his shirtsleeve, as a troop leader? It’s inconceivable. So leftists not only want homosexuals to be able to advertise their sexuality, but also to be free from the consequences any other group would suffer for doing so.
Equality?
Returning to Gates, it’s ironic he was defense secretary as his specialty seems to be waving a white flag. He said at the BSA meeting that his organization cannot “ignore the social, political and juridical changes taking place in our country.” Perhaps he’d rather live on his knees than die on his feet, but he’s not supposed to ignore them — he’s supposed to fight them. Dealing with “the world as it is” sometimes means rejecting it. Otherwise, we’re simply people who’d accept human sacrifice in medieval Aztec times, slavery in slave times, and gas chambers in Nazi times.
Gates also said that ignoring the homosexual agenda could mean the end of the BSA “as a national movement.” But the BSA has already suffered and lost millions of dollars due to sexual abuse, and I can’t imagine anything that would cause parents to flee the organization more than the prospect of a homosexual scout leader camping with their sons.
Gates warned that we cannot ignore the times and “put our heads in the sand.” Americans ought to tell him — and the homosexual agenda — to go pound sand.
