Up until now, the Philadelphia area chapter of the Boy Scouts of America got a nice building from the city for only $1 per year.
But now their free ride is over, because of their policy against homosexuals.
In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts are a private organization, and are therefore entitled to bar whomever they want from their ranks.
But the city doesn't have to support the Boy Scouts' exclusionary policy, and so, according to a report from KYW New Radio, "City solicitor Romy Diaz had given the 'Cradle of Liberty Council' of the Scouts until Monday to renounce the Scouts' national policy against homosexuals, or pay market rate rent ($200,000 a year) for its headquarters on city-owned land, or find a new home."
The report goes on to say, "Solicitor Diaz acknowledges that the US Supreme Court has ruled that the national Boy Scouts, as a private organization, had the right to exclude homosexuals from its ranks. But he says the city 'will not subsidize that discrimination by passing on the costs to the people of Philadelphia.'"
Yay.
But I am concerned for the innocent young boys who join the Scouts. What are they learning from this?
I hope they are learning that bigotry is not acceptable.
I hope they're not being brainwashed into believing that the city is wrong for not supporting discrimination with taxpayers' dollars.
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http://www.maryshawonline.com
Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated.
To some one from Australia might ask “where’s the controversy?”
They got the funding because of the perception of 'public Good' now they are discriminating that common good is no longer a valid argument. Legal restrictions aside they should be given notice to quit the premises.
In Australia regardless of the organization is private public the Discrimination Act would apply and they would find themselves facing prosecution, an order to desist, fines and probably Common law action by the excluded scouts. In short they would have broken the law.
While I am an unrepentant leftie/humanist I have no problems with laws that stifle such prejudges. Prejudices are like grudges no matter how well you nurse them they’ll never get better. Social engineering?Unashamedly and Absolutely! Dictatorial, perhaps.
Societies left to their own devices will, like matter devolve into Entropy much as my body element will but I don’t see why we as a species can’t defer societal entropy as long as possible 2-3 Billion years perhaps.
Somewhere along the line society’s leaders need to set rules for the greater good. If a private organization is destroyed because it refuses to observe common good principals then so be it. No sympathy for the weak scout leadership in PA.
by
Andris (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 531 comments)
on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 7:24:43 PM
. . . is that it will not assign openly homosexual men as Scoutmasters. Since boys entering Scouting are young (8-10 for Cub Scouts, and 11+ for the Boy Scouts), it's quite probable that most of the entering boys who turn out to be homosexual don't really know or understand that at the time they begin Scouting. The BSA can't exclude hmosexual boys from joining, simply because few of them really know that they are.
But let's get realistic here: if the BSA started assigning openly homosexual men as Scoutmasters, they'd have troops of zero. As the father of two daughters, sure as Hell would never have sent them out camping in the woods with an adult man as their leader. And the parents of adolescent boys, having been exposed to the almost daily stories of another child molester caught (as often as not an adult male molesting adolescent boys), aren't going to send their sons out camping unsupervised by anybody but an openly homosexual man. While being a homosexual male does not mean that a person is attracted to adolescent boys, parents are almost always going to err on the side of caution. It doesn't matter how liberal they are, how tolerant they see themselves to be, or how open-minded they think they are: parents are hard-wired to be protective of their children.
We see the stories almost daily, about how some adult entrusted with the care of children, whether teachers or camp counselors or clergy or coaches, really too many positions to list, has molested one or more of the adolescents in his charge -- and a lot of perfectly normal people in those positions feel that they are viewed with a little bit of suspicion, just for being in those positions, even though they've never been accused or even suspected of anything. Don't think that caring parents wouldn't worry about sending their 13 year old son out into the woods with a Scoutmaster, and if they knew, in advance, that he was homosexual, you might as well forget it.
My friends on the left will hate this comment, and say that it is wholly unjustified to link openly homosexual men with child molesters -- and maybe, in an abstract sense, it is. But parents aren't dealing with the abstract; they are dealing with the very concrete problems of protecting their own children.
by
Dana Pico (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 142 comments)
on Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 6:55:56 PM
3 comments
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