The war against the Boy Scouts

Rocket Man’s post immediately below describes the federal district court decision in the latest lawsuit seeking to hobble and stigmatize the Boy Scouts. As Rocket Man notes, the lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
This lawsuit is simply the most recent front in the ACLU’s long war against the Boy Scouts. For more than 10 years, the ACLU supported litigation seeking to have the Boy Scouts declared a public accommodation prohibited from “discriminating” against homosexual leaders under the civil rights laws of various states. The most famous of these lawsuits was of course the case involving gay Scoutmaster James Dale that ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court after the New Jersey Supreme Court had ruled in Dale’s favor.
The ACLU sustained a reverse in the Supreme Court decision in the Dale case by the narrowest of margins — one that almost certainly will not be able to withstand the Court’s decision in the Lawrence case this past June. In its Dale decision, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protection of associational rights extended to the Boy Scouts.
But the ACLU’s war against the Boy Scouts did not pause even momentarily. It resumed in the litigation Rocket Man describes below. The Claremont Institute’s Ben Boychuk noted and condemned the litigation upon its commencement in 2000: “The ACLU versus freedom of assembly.” Ben wrote: “The ACLU will not stop its war against the Scouts until they interpret that oath the ACLU way, define diversity the ACLU way, and accept as members those whom the ACLU deems acceptable. Perhaps only when the ACLU creates the merit badges will the campaign end.”
Thinking through Ben’s point, one must ask what those ACLU-approved merit badges would be for. The photos to which Rocket Man helpfully links provide some ground for speculation. The object, of course, is to perfect the project initiated by Nietzsche and pursued by his many less witty successors among the Democrats, the ACLU, and their liberal friends since the nineteenth century, the project Nietzsche called “the transvaluation of values.”
Recall the Boy Scout oath: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.” The Scouts provide an interpretation of each element of the oath. The Scouts teach, for example, “Being morally straight means to live your life with honesty, to be clean in your speech and actions, and to be a person of strong character.”
The moral teaching of Scouting is illustrated in James Dale’s own experience. The edition of the Boy Scout Handbook that guided Dale’s experience through the ranks as a Scout provided: “When you live up to the trust of fatherhood your sex life will fit into God’s wonderful plan of creation. Fuller understanding of wholesome sex behavior can bring you lifelong happiness. A moment of so-called sexual freedom can turn into a lifetime of regrets.”
The ACLU first tried and failed in the Dale litigation to destroy the Scouts by having it declared a “public accommodation” — an organization that believes in nothing in particular. Now the ACLU seeks to destroy the Scouts by stigmatizing it as an organization devoted to the advancement of bigotry. In the name of enlightenment and toleration, the ACLU ultimately demands that we not merely accept the normalization of homosexuality, but that we approve and “Celebrate diversity!”
HINDROCKET adds: The Trunk wonders what merit badges will be approved when the ACLU runs the Boy Scouts. This one certainly won’t be:
2Americanism-1.gif
That’s the merit badge for Americanism, one of the badges Scouts can work on at Camp Balboa. The concept, the badge and the organization are all endangered species.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses