I feel so conflicted about whether I still want it there.
IMO, if your experience was wholesome and instructive then in gratitude to your instructors continue to display your medal.
Are you seriously taking the distraction/demoralization that easily?
While the sins of abuse must not be ignored, and should likewise be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, this Obama/Netflix expose is intended to diffuse the impact of Sound of Freedom. You see, the #ing Rats just like nasty biotches, are pretty good at deflecting. Anticipate an accounting of Church abuses.
Don’t piss on the majority of Scout leaders that volunteered their free time to encourage and guide young males into adulthood.
You did your job, and you earned the medal. There is nothing for you to be ashamed about.
I don’t know how I missed all that jazz in my youth, 3 years of scouts, 2-3 trips a year, Meetings every Wednesday night . I missed all of it. All my friends did too.
I know how you feel. But keep it proudly up on your wall. You worked hard for it, and being an Eagle Scout once really did mean something.
For the same reasons, I still wear my US Navy hat, even though the US Navy today is a hot mess of wokeness and run by people who would push a button to launch a missle at me rather than at enemies of this country.
I only spent three years in the Boy Scouts, but I treasure it because I learned a lot and had a lot of fun in it.
Eagle is an individual honor, and if you deserved it (didn’t have 54 merit badges when you were 13 because your Dad was friends with the scoutmaster), then display it proudly.
I learned honor in Boy Scouts, and I still try to do at least one good deed every day (I’m 73). I hate posting about this topic, it grieves me so what has happened.
Keep it there. The Boy Scouts stand for everything good about America. This problem was forced on them by people who hate the Boy Scouts and America.
My brother and I are Eagle Scouts. My father took over as scoutmaster of the troop founded by Rabbi Alexander Goode, who became imortalized as one of the Four Chaplains, who went down with the Dorchester in WWII.
“ I feel so conflicted about whether I still want it there.l
Why? You earned it.
L
More than 130,000,000 boys have been Boy Scouts.
Sadly any organization that does anything With children will attract predators.
Some will get through and some of the abuse will come from the boys themselves.
I don’t know what the allegations of “cover up” are in this documentary, I was a cub master for a few years and the training I received from the Boy Scout organization to recognize and report abuse was quite good.. so at the time I was active (2000s)it was clearly not passively permissive about the dangers of predators.
I can tell you stories about folks we actively had arrested who tried to infiltrated our summer day camps etc.
No boy should ever be abused, however 82,000 represents .06% or less than 1 child per 1700 boys who wen through the program.
The overall national average for sexual abuse of boys in the United States is estimated to be 5.1% - 7.5% (https://uwjoshuacenter.org/how-common-child-sexual-abuse#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20prevalence%20of%20CSA,boys%20in%20the%20United%20States.) or 5-7 kids per 100. So the Boy Scouts rate of sexual abuse is around 1/100th of the national average. So that speaks to a very strong record of preventing child sexual abuse as an organization.
As I said I do not know what this documentary claims in terms of “covering up” the abuse that did happen. I have no doubt that there were almost certainly efforts to keep certain things quiet or minimized over the 113 years the scouts have existed, as things like this were kept quiet and covered up as part of general societal pressures and norms for a great portion of that history. This is to an excuse for it, but context does matter.
The tack record of the organization overall appears to be far far superior to the general population when it comes to child sexual abuse. And I can speak first hand to my experiences with it, that they did not eff around when it came to such things. However at the end of the day it is an organization of men (and I mean men as in mankind) so it will have failings and faults. It is possible that individual BSA councils did knowingly allow things to go in and turn a blind eye just like it could be possible The national council may have as well… but based on the numbers I am hard pressed to see that there was an epidemic of child
Sexual abuse within the scouting org that they allowed to fester.
I am an ex Scout leader. The timing is really suspect. Scouting USA (their new name) just came out of Bankruptcy having sold off a bunch of property to settle the class action lawsuit on this. I quit scouts because they added a woke citizenship merit badge as the 13th eagle required. This was a 20 year ride that I finally had to get off. I also am not sure they have really learned the lesson. A friend was sexually harassed by an older male adult while she was volunteering at a scout reserve. She was treated as the bad apple for making the accusations!
i still have my merit badge sash around, will not give that up for anything, I was a scout in the late 60’s and early 70’s, no homo’s around. one scout master was a LAFD capt., and the other was my dad..