Boy Scouts expelled from school in Seattle

Seattle public schools are cutting ties with the Boy Scouts. The ostensible reason had to do with the "academic rigor" of an outdoor course the Scouts had been offering at the school for some 30 years.

Yeah. Right. When was the last time you heard of a public school cancelling a class because of "academic rigor"? I mean, if we're going to start cutting classes in public schools because of that, we could dramatically shorten the schedule and send kids home early every day.

But the underlying reason appeared to be the Scouts policy not allowing homosexual scoutmasters.

It's funny that no one disassociated themselves from the Boy Scouts when it didn't do enough about pedophile scoutmasters in their ranks, but now institutions are shunning them because they do not allow homosexual scoutmasters. Not protecting boys enough is okay, but trying to protect them too much gets you the boot.

Our schools. Just looking out for the kids.

HT: Education News

PRESS RELEASE: United Way of the Bluegrass pulls support from Boy Scouts

LEXINGTON, KY—The Family Foundation today said the United Way of the Bluegrass should be engaging in charity, not politics. The group responded to reports that the United Way was pulling funding of the local chapter of the Boys Scouts because of the organization's policy against hiring gay scoutmasters.

"This is the first time to our knowledge that the United Way of the Bluegrass has targeted a group for persecution because it didn't hold a particular political position," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation.

The group said it was trying to find out if the action was taken unilaterally by United Way's president, Bill Farmer, or whether the United Way board voted on the action. "If this was a board decision, we would like to know which of the local banks and insurance agencies and computer companies who are represented on their board want the Boy Scouts de-funded." Cothran said his group will try to determine how the decision was made and by whom.

"The United Way should be a politically non-partisan organization," said Cothran. "Now it seems to be moving in a more political direction. Instead of trying to intimidate the nonprofit organizations it supports into following its increasingly liberal political agenda, it should be trying to help its member groups. This is a disservice to the community and we think it hurts United Way's credibility."

Cothran said his group is urging United Way donors to send the money they would otherwise give the United Way to the local chapter of the Boy Scouts of America instead. "That way it will go to help children, not support liberal political causes."

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What are the Boy Scouts for? Anthony Esolen on what a boy is

It is a commentary on the intellectual condition of our modern culture that the smarter you purport to be, the less you are able to tell the difference between boys and girls.

The Boy Scouts recent announcement that they are abandoning their policy against admitting open homosexuals as Scouts. Fortunately, most local Scout leaders understand what they are for, but their leaders, like those in many other cultural conservative institutions, are largely worthless when it comes to standing up for anything. Apparently Boy Scout leaders mistook the admonition "Quit yourselves like men" for "Quit like men." Now that they've taken a giant leap toward becoming (as Anthony Esolen remarks) the "Unisex Scouts," it is becoming very much less clear exactly what their justification is.

Here's Esolen, pointing out obvious things that pretty much everyone knows to be true, but which we all now have to pretend are not true because the gods of Tolerance and Diversity must be propitiated with cant and justified with sophistry:

I see a boy: ... vir futurus, a going-to-be man. Meaning: He will join other men, brothers fighting to attain or defend the common good. Greater meaning: He is made for a self-giving that is categorically impossible among his male friends. He is made for a woman. It is the orientation of his body, in its sexual form. It is the orientation of his masculine being, developing in a natural and healthy way. 

None of this should be controversial, no more than claiming that the noonday sky is blue. Should someone protest, “It isn’t so! I saw it green once, when a tornado was coming,” we’d look askance, and wonder whether he had lost the capacity for normal communication. A boy is not a girl. A boy grows up to be a man. A man marries a woman, for love and for a family: That goal is stamped upon his body. Even savages without a doctorate in philosophy can figure it out.

Read the rest here.

Boy Scouts being expelled for views on homosexuality

Another one that goes into the Decline of Western Civilization file. While the left-wing political activists get to set up shop in our public universities at taxpayer expense to agitate for gay rights and abortion on demand, the Boy Scouts are being kicked out of public facilities for the traditionalist views on homosexuality.

Go figure.