Ryan Andresen, a gay 17-year-old Eagle Scout (now nearly 18), is outraged that his hard work for years toward earning his Eagle Scout award is now not recognized -- despite past encouragement -- as the headmaster of the Scouts in his area has refused to issue it to him because he is manifestly gay and doesn't believe in God. The Boy Scouts do not accept gays or atheists in their organizations.
Ryan Andresen, whose Eagle Scout project consisted of building a "tolerance wall" in his high school out of contributed tiles, is urging people to sign a protest petition (currently with nearly 360,000 signatures), and his father, a scoutmaster himself and an administrator in the organization, has resigned from the Scouts in protest. Others have as well, and the news sites and the blogs have filled up with indignation about Ryan's struggle. Few "progressives" miss a chance to take a star turn on this issue, and Intel -- one of the Big IT firms headquartered in Santa Calara, California -- is now threatening to withdrew its donation to the Scouts unless it changes its policy to accept gays. Gosh, this is like the tech blogger mogul Michael Arrington, who de-friended me and blocked me from viewing his public Facebook page because I dared to disagree with his support of this tactic for gaining gay rights.
I don't support Ryan's cause, and I think it undermines freedom of association and freedom of speech for everyone, including, ultimately LGBT people; I think it will cause further backlashes, and will not work.
Those that support this cause think that eventually, the Boy Scouts can be muscled by 350,000 signatures or who knows, 7 million, or the withdrawal of financial support from more and more communities. I don't think we'll see that, and if we do, we'll see a bigger and more aggressive move to preserve not only the "family values" but we'll see more and more efforts to ban any move toward gay rights that will undermine the cause.
Now, does my failure to support Ryan mean I am against gay rights? No, I'm four-square for them. If Ryan was being prevented from taking a male date to his high school prom, I'd support him and protest at the PTA or in the school if it were my school. I'd sign a petition about it if it were taken to a larger audience. I'd support gay marriage rights in his state when he is at least 18 if that were his choice. If he were attacked, I'd support prosecution of the perpetrators to the fullest extent of the law as a hate crime. I'd do anything of this sort that supports equality and rights. But I won't support attacks and boycotts on other private organizations to get them to knuckle under and accept gays. I worry about a society where aggressive minorities of any type could do this anywhere -- it would not be a free society.
And does my strong resistance to Ryan's chosen method to gain his rights and the rights of others somehow mean I'm for "taking away his rights"? I'm for others protesting, but not him? That's the sort of belligerently ignorant response you get on forums when you take up any position resistant to the politically-correct line set by "progressives" -- but of course that's not the case. Gays can -- and do, without my permission LOL -- express their rights and boycotts and challenges and splitting of organizations are within their protected First Amendment speech, and nobody, least of all me, is for taking it away from them.
But I will challenge it because it's wrong, and contains grave implications for all our rights -- and the Supreme Court agrees, as you can see from this long litany of legal challenges.
ABC rushed to the rescue, shouting that Ryan was being "bullied" by the Boy Scouts. ABC seems to deliberately blur the distinction between individual troop members who may have harassed Ryan, and the Boy Scouts organization as such, implying that it has a policy of bullying gays. Nonsense. While the bullying Ryan experienced in his youth, having "faggot" charcoaled on his chest at camp, for example, is real and painful -- sadly, now it's Ryan and his very media-savvy adult supporters who are the bullies of this private organizations, trying to forcibly convert it to their viewpoints. The answer to bullying is not more bullying and attempts to silence those with different viewpoints.
There is already a Supreme Court ruling that the Boy Scouts (and by extension any organization) get to decide who their members are, and yet these activists want to keep trying to break that law and overturn it. Why? They sense they have some victories behind them (gay marriage passed in some states); they sense they have our Community-Organizer-in-Chief at their back, perhaps to sound off on the issue using the presidency as a bully pulpit on social issues (as he has done against Koran burning -- also protected speech under the First Amendment -- and insistence that the Jesuits pay for Sandra Fluke's birth control -- a violation of the separation of church and state. And they got the Scouts to go through a laborious two-year process of reviewing this issue, so they may have them by the short hairs.
Not that the Scouts like to discuss private parts -- that's just it, their reasoning on barring gays has to do with a perception that preparing boys for manhood in this skill-building organization must preclude manifestation and discussion of sex, and sexual preferences -- remember before these recent scandals, the Boy Scouts were most famous for warning against the dangers of masturbation. They see these ideals as part of "clean living" -- it is not that they are propagating hatred of gays, or engaging in an educational program against gays continuously -- they see the explicit nature of the activist gay and they wish to outlaw explictness. That may be a distinction without a difference, but it is one that the BSA has resolutely upheld. Don't like it? Make your own scouting organization -- this is a free country and should stay that way.
As with Chik-fil-A, the religious restaurant franchisers, there isn't a "gay test" or any kind of expulsion of gays on mere suspicion. No, it's more about barring those who decide to make an issue of their sexual preferences -- and in fact, we don't have a single, solid case of any actual gay person fierd from this franchise or denied entry to buy the sandwiches, so it's a fake hypothetical edge-case.
And that's one of the aspects of Ryan's fight that I definitely don't like because it's hardly convincing. In fact, there really something contrived about the entire affair (as with Sandra Fluke) -- it's a deliberate act of defiance to make a point and force a response and create a controversy. Ryan makes it seem as if the Eagle Scouts snuck up from behind and hit him over the head with this decision. But if he announced himself publicly as gay, and built a tolerance wall in his high school explicitly as a gay person who wanted no one to be bullied. This is admirable and I support it, but you can't do this, and then expect the Scouts not to react.It was done deliberately. Yeah, I get it that Rosa Parks had to sit down at the front of the bus, and history is filled with cases of people defying the norms to get their rights. But those acts didn't involve *taking away* the freedoms of others; this does.
When he got the news that he was disqualified from receiving his Eagle award, instead of accepting that this was the consequence of his explicit manifestation of himself as gay and agnostic, he chose to edge-case it and try to turn on the tears. In news accounts, he claims to acknowledge and accept that the Scouts have such a policy and even indicates that he doesn't expect it to change it, but that he wants an exception made for him because he is a teenager who tried hard and was nearly reaching his goal. That's not much of an argument.
Here's what the Scouts themselves said:
"Recently, a Scout proactively notified his unit leadership and Eagle Scout counselor that he does not agree to Scouting's principle of 'Duty to God,' and does not meet Scouting's membership standard on sexual orientation," the statement reads. "While the Boy Scouts of America did not proactively ask for this information, based on his statements and after discussion with his family, he is being informed that he is no longer eligible for membership in Scouting."
This wording is important -- note again that the Boy Scouts did not *proactively* ask for this information -- they seem to have a sort of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of sorts -- but because he was making public statements, they made the decision.
Clearly Ryan's parents, supportive of him (and that's a good thing!) decided to make an issue of this as a form of activism. That's their right. But I think it's wrong -- and it's a tactic that is not going to bring us gay rights or increased tolerance in the end -- nor is it a desirable end state for society that a few select "progressives" get to decide the line -- right or wrong -- and impose it through publicity, boycotts, withdrawal of financial support from business or foundations, etc.
I believe all of those tools *are* legitimate when there is a clear-cut goal that involves a manifest principle like equality. If there were a proposition on gay marriage, I'd vote for it, or if the school wouldn't allow the same-sex prom date, I'd sign a petition. But the principle at stake here is this: "Break the First Amendment, break Supreme Court decisions, so I can get my way." The principle is not the liberal one of freedom of association and speech; it's the illiberal one of coercion to make everyone conform. That's the sort of action that gays, who were forced to conform in the past themselves to society's mainstream norms, shouldn't be inflicting on the public.
as you can see from a long-winded polemics with a Facebook friend if you follow me on Facebook, or from comments on the Huffpo, there's a certain meme developed by the prog-o-sphere now to the effect that "right wing elements in the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church of Latter-Day Saints have taken over the Boy Scouts" and inflict this "anti-gay" position on them. But as I go to great lengths to argue, whatever the ties to churches, whatever the chartered relationships (and that needs more authentication) or meeting places in church basements, the Boy Scouts cannot be said to be a religious organization, or a group engaged in religious indoctrination. Trying to imply that it is because it has these affiliations is lame -- it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. All you have to do is look at the badges or activities -- they are about woodcarving or computers these days, not hating gays.
As the executive from another big firm -- AT&T -- has gotten in on the act, there is hope from some quarters that the Scouts will be muscled at least in California to drop the bar against gays. Perhaps central command will ease up and allow localities to make their own discretionary judgements on this matter.
But I actually don't think they will do this -- and if they do, the precedent set of Big IT and wealthy Californians being able to muscle private organizations
Yeah, I get it that when you don't share the beliefs of an organization, you get to lobby its funders and backers to try to change their views, that "this is democracy" and that it's First Amendment activity. But so is questioning the morality and the efficacy of this approach.
I think it's hugely troubling as a civic proposition, because the end state is conformism to a "progressive agenda," and not the lifeblood of pluralism that makes up a real liberal democracy.
While the activists would like to make it seem as if the Boy Scout's position is mere bigotry, like bigotry against Catholics or racism against blacks, it's actually worth thinking about what their reasoning is and what it says about gay culture and its propositions for identity politics and bullying tactics to force acceptance of that culture.
I've blogged before about how I felt the gay marriage cause -- which I support unconditionally -- is not supported by the effort to run Chick-fil-A out of town, block business permits, and ruin its business. Chick-fil-A simply showed that two can play at that game when they blandly told the Sesame Street toy manufacturers who said they were pulling their toys from the chicken happy meals that they were rejecting the toys anyway as they posed a danger to young children of injury. Maybe the chicken folks were sincere in discovering the toys posed a threat, but maybe they just learned how to play the PC game the hard-ball way.
The Boy Scouts seem to be basically saying the following things:
o they don't want sex to be part of their mission -- and the gay activists insist on making sex explicit, even broadcasting the sexual preferences of young teenagers
o they don't want the threat of child predators that they believe is associated with having gay scout-masters. That's their belief, even though there is nothing to show that such a policy a) is accurate regarding the propensity of gays for child molestation or b) any deterrence anyway, as the Scouts have had their cases of molestation as well, like the Catholic Church
o they think "clean living" involves orientation toward God and barring of gays, because the gay culture is not one that sustains the traditional institutions of marriage for the sake of procreation and fidelity.
On this last point, as I've blogged before, they have a point, as the first thing Dan Savage has done with the gay marriage issue is to turn the concept of the loyalty of marriage on its ear, urging that a more open concept of marriage with cheating and even promiscuity be accepted as long as everybody involved adopts Savage's religious doctrine about "good, willing, and game".
Gay culture has of course evolved as it came out of the closet. The whole reason there is a gay marriage drive is because like other human beings, gays want to have long-lasting monogamous relationships. With the possibility of adoption or sperm donation and artificial fertilization, a gay couple can more easily have a baby of their own. Once that exigency drops away, it's kind of hard to insist that marriage be conceived, as in the olden days, as only between one man and one woman for the sake of procreation.
If gay activists want to show that they are "just like anybody else," "normal," and even worthy of being scout masters, then to the extent that they can affirm stabilizing institutions like monogamous marriage and activities for children that don't involve explicit sex, they would win more converts to their cause. They do not seem willing to do that, or at least, a hard-core activists' fringe has insisted in getting in everybody's face with it.
As I said, I'm not for conditions for gay marriage or gay rights. But I do argue against the negative aspects of the fuck-you hedonism of gay life that brooks no dissent; the destructiveness to the institution of fidelity in marriage that is implied with promiscuity; , and the unwillingness to keep childhood activities free of explicit sex. These are all cultural issues on a moral sliding scale with or without religious overtones for some. How *much* promiscutiy? Just what *is* explicit sex? And so on.
The Boy Scouts solve this debate by saying they are having none of it. And they get to do that, and should be left alone. People who believe otherwise should leave the organization, and even build an alternative organization that has the values they espouse.
Instead, some think that "progressives" should stay in the Scouts and keep badgering them to change. I see only the conservative publication The Blaze making the point that there are free speech issues on both side of this controversy that make the answers not easy.
I don't want to live in a society where the privacy of an organization and its right to chose its members and articulate its values are threatened by hegemonic "progressives" or any political forces, and Big IT and the leftwing media moguls whether Arrington or Huffpo. The Boy Scouts are within their rights to chose their members, and it is not discrimination under the law.
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