A READER writes:

It’s over for the Boy Scouts. There’s going to be no balanced coverage of this old story. My view is that they could have done worse and they could have done better, but certainly it was the custom of the time not to talk about it, or report it, but just try to get rid of the problem.

The condemnation will be deadly.

They kept records as a way to deal with the problem, and they will suffer for it. There will be no just appraisal of old behavior. They will be sued and sued and hounded out of every school and church in the land. In the future men and boys will not be allowed to gather together, unless they are properly chaperoned — by women.

I’m going to find a way to stand up about this, but not by myself.

My Boy Scout years were valuable and wonderful.

—– Comments —

James P. writes:

Your reader said, “They kept records as a way to deal with the problem, and they will suffer for it.”

My question is, did they deal with the problem? That is, once they identified a pervert, did they ensure that he never had anything to do with boys again? If so, then I am not sure why this should destroy the Scouts. The Roman Catholic Church shielded the problem priests and moved them from place to place — is that what the Boy Scouts did? If so, then that is a much more harmful case.

If the pedophilia scandal destroys the Scouts, it will be because the liberal media is “out to get them” because of their anti-gay stance. Yet that anti-gay stance helps to exclude pedophiles from participation in Scouting! 

Laura writes:

Yes, given the higher incidence of pedophilia among homosexuals, which has been documented, the Boy Scouts of America should be lauded for doing something very significant to protect boys from abuse by prohibiting homosexuals from serving as scout leaders.

Kevin M. writes:

Gotta say, it looks bad for the BS of A.

The haters who loathe males being male will dine out on this until the wheels fall off.

Still, keeping secrets like this for since whenever doesn’t shine too well on the BS of A PR machine. Skeletons, anyone?

We’ll see.

Mary writes:

The article refers to Ineligible Volunteers Files kept on those who attracted suspicion, so it seems the BSA had the right idea about keeping offenders out and not giving second chances. Homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders under great pressure from activist homosexuals upon the APA in 1973. It seems the Boy Scouts were some of the first to be put in the very awkward position of having to make sense of this new classification of homosexuality; this emancipation of what was from time immemorial considered without question unnatural and deeply disordered behavior; all while boys were still being abused. The BSA reacted with what was legally and professionally advised at that time. They have since fought hard to keep homosexuals out of the leadership of the scouts – for good reason it can be seen – and have been highly successful (unlike the Girl Scouts). This success has enraged homosexual activists along with their unwitting conspirators, liberals, who helped create the problem in the first place with their support of homosexual causes from day one.

The liberal media has gone after the Church over the abuse problem for years. It seems quite disingenuous for those who vocally disagree with priestly celibacy, indeed with Catholicism itself, and who support homosexuality – and in turn homosexuality’s intense focus on the young male, it’s higher incidence of pedophilia, along with it’s quest to lower the age of consent, etc. – to have the loudest voices of protest against the problem. One can only conclude that this was not about the behavior of the priests – since if they support homosexuality they cannot at the same time object to common homosexual behavior – but was actually seen as a window of opportunity to do great harm to the Church, propelled not by a liberal’s own treasured values but adopting the treasured values of faithful Catholics and using them against Catholics themselves. Hypocrisy in the name of ideology. The Boy Scouts are getting the same treatment now, not that liberals truly love the traditional values that the BSA has promoted all these years, but because they are not being allowed to foul those traditional values. That said, the BSA has been quite savvy up until now in protecting itself. Let’s hope that continues.

It is telling that the public schools are not subjected to the same scrutiny, even as not only boys but girls, too, are being abused at much higher rates, due alone, it could be argued, to the massive size of our nation’s public school system. But you would think their would be a modicum of concern. Here is an AP piece I found buried in the newspaper several years back. Once again rational thinking and logic are not made use of: just as the women PP claims to help are harmed evermore in the name of ideology, so the children liberals claim to have greatest concern for are sacrificed as well.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I was never a Scout, but I hope that Scouting survives.  What fascinates me is not so much the revelation about Scouting as the revelation about liberalism, which is willing to switch positions diametrically, systematically ignore evidence, and exploit whatever is of momentary advantage against the objects of its perpetual scorn and hatred.  For decades the Boy Scout organization made the point that permitting homosexuals to serve as group leaders would be to invite abuse.  The Scouts based their position on the well-grounded assumption that male homosexuality is essentially pedophiliac and that it would be crazy to put pedophiles in charge of boys and adolescents.  The American Left sustained a relentless culture-war against the Scouts that rested on categorizing that perfectly reasonable assumption and its argumentative consequence as a bigoted fantasy.  Now it turns out that when homosexuals did inveigle the organization, they perpetrated exactly the kinds of abuses predicted by conservative wisdom.  What is the Left’s new argument?  It is that the Scouts are wicked for concealing documentation that homosexual group leaders had preyed on their charges.  Of course these developments are in part a replay of another of the Left’s ongoing crusades – the one against the Catholic Church.  In the eyes of the Left, the Church is guilty on the one hand of condemning homosexuality and of trying to keep homosexuals out of the priesthood and on the other of covering up the outrages of priest-pedophiles.

I am reminded by a series of associations of something that I witnessed twenty years ago while teaching at Central Michigan University, which also reveals the evil of liberalism.  There had been several sexual scandals involving faculty in exploitative relations with students.  The administration responded by proposing a rule.  That rule would have made it out of order for any faculty member to engage in sexual relations with any student currently under his or her supervision.  In other words, if “Coed Candy” were enrolled in Professor Romeo’s postmodern novel class this semester, Professor Romeo would merely have to wait until the next semester to unwrap her.  The rule went before the faculty committee for approval – and the faculty voted it down by a whopping colossal margin.  Liberals will not even vote minimally to delay gratification, but they call other people wicked for taking commonsense measures to protect the young against criminal trespass.

Texanne writes:

The Boy Scout sex abuse scandal might actually provide the opportunity to discuss homosexuality honestly.  Not only do these files reveal that there is a sound basis for excluding homosexual men from the organization, but the pattern of secrecy seems to contradict the picture of victimhood and persecution that the alternative sex community claims to qualify its members for protected status.  Up till now, our society has been remarkably silent and confused about to what extent and under what circumstances men and women may have been bullied or victimized by reason of their sexual preferences and activity — allowing the sex activists to write their own sad story of oppression.

Maybe it’s time to examine the nature and accuracy of the victim narrative which the LGBTQ community regularly uses to disarm the emotionally susceptible and the young people who have little experience with logic and limited knowledge of even recent history. The truth about sexual behaviors and cultural norms and attitudes is far different and more nuanced than the activists portray, and that sentimentalists can process.

Our children are victimized every day by people who don’t touch them or even get near them, but who constantly bombard youngsters’ minds with sexual thoughts and images and generate anxiety about what kind of sex they might prefer or even what sex they might be. There are no secret files kept on these predators — they abuse openly and with public funds, with the endorsement of school authorities and even with parental approval.  And yet, somehow, the protective glow of victimhood remains.

Perhaps the Boy Scout abuse story will help to dispel the victimhood myth.

Laura writes:

Texanne adds:

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