Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Boy Scout leaders vote to officially end ban on gay adults

It's not that I feel gay people are incapable of leading a Boy Scout troop. Rather, I question the logic of having people who may be sexually attracted to young men sleeping in tents with teenage boys.

I would also question a straight man leading a group of Girl Scouts, and sleeping out in the woods with a bunch of teenage girls.

It was so much easier to send your kids off to camp when sex was never part of the equation. 

Discrimination should have no place in Boy Scouts. However, prudence and accountability should.

The Boy Scouts of America on Monday ended its blanket ban on gay adult leaders while allowing church-sponsored Scout units to maintain the exclusion for religious reasons.

It was approved by the BSA's National Executive Board on a 45-12 vote during a closed-to-the-media teleconference.

"For far too long this issue has divided and distracted us," said the BSA's president, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "Now it's time to unite behind our shared belief in the extraordinary power of Scouting to be a force for good."


I’ve long held that we owe the greatness of this country to a salutary blend between secular rules and moral values, a good working together of God and Caesar. I've further maintained that Christian moral values induce behaviors that obviate the need for an excessive number of secular rules; they keep government from having to regulate moral behavior.

One reason the Constitution is so relatively simple is because, as John Adams himself said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In other words, the two are necessary.

I've always seen the Establishment Clause, the very first words of the Bill of Rights, as the umbilical cord between our secular and religious laws, the religious being just as important as the secular because they are the source of our morals, virtues and values. Now we seem to be losing these.

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