Posted on 06/16/2005 11:22:21 AM PDT by SandRat
The year 2007 would have marked the 100th birthday of Boy Scouting in England. Unfortunately, the British Boy Scouts, founded by Lord Robert Baden-Powell as the first Scouting group in the world, is now a dead organization.
The recent decision by U.K. Scout Association executives to make chaos of the Scout Oath mangles the program far beyond anything Baden-Powell might recognize. Instead of being required to pledge their loyalty to "God and the Queen," members of the Scout Association can now opt to swear allegiance to any combination of things. Muslims can pledge to Allah, Hindus to Dharma, and atheists to life in "good moral standing." Anti-monarchs can omit the Queen's title and mention instead the state.
But the decision isn't much of a surprise.
In 1991, UK Scout executives decided to give troops the option of allowing equal access for girls and boys to any of its programs. By 1996, nearly 26,000 girls had joined. By 2000, British Scouting authorities required that all newly formed troops be co-educational.
In a statement of special problems that may arise with the integration of young ladies with young men on camping trips and the like, U.K. Scout Association administrators asseverate:
In the instance of physical building constraints, commissioners should first establish whether these problems have been raised as a cover for opposition to making mixed provision. Where these problems are real, commissioners should emphasise that these are NOT gender issues but are resource problems.
That's officialese for saying that tenting arrangements, bathroom issues, and other gender differences are simply relics of a time when males dominated society and filled the ranks of Scouting exclusively. Today, everyone is equal.
At an October 1997 meeting of the executive board of the U.K. Scout Association, a decision was made to admit open homosexuals into troops as leaders and members. "Society has changed considerably since 1907," wrote British Scouting executives in their revolutionary "Equal Opportunities Policy Guidelines." "The Scout Association has had to recognize these changes in how we describe what we stand for." The new non-discrimination code included a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of "marital or sexual status" and "political or religious belief."
The London Telegraph asked Lord Baden-Powell's grandson, a vice president for the U.K. Scout Association, to comment on the decision, but he said only that the board had made the decision without his knowledge. Baden-Powell's 79-year old daughter, Betty Clay, denounced the decisions and political correctness of the Scout Association. "He, in his writings to young men, and in his responses to many anxious young men's inquiries, always made it clear that they should do their best to keep themselves clean in thought, word, and deed ... They should ... look on themselves as guardians of their bodies and minds and to do as far they could according to the will of God."
Today, homosexuals are allowed to become Scout leaders without question, because "there is no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, and therefore there is no justification for restricting membership on this basis." Only a brief note at the bottom of the non-discrimination code clarifies what was clearly considered by executives in discussions of sexual status: "Pedophilia is a bar to any involvement in the Scout Movement."
Aside from pedophilia, sexual relationships are not only tolerated, but encouraged in the confines of the English Scouting experience:
It is important for leaders to help some young people to understand the nature of public and private behaviour, and the need to respect other people's privacy and personal space. When two young people do form an emotional attachment, leaders should both support their need for some privacy together as well as help them to remember their other friends, who may feel rejected by the couple.
Far from the abstinence-based approach of the Boy Scouts of America, British Scouts encourage Scout leaders to discuss "sexual behavior and practices" and "contraception" with their troop members. The only significant restrictions placed on troop leaders are mandatory abidance of the new age-of-consent laws (age 16) passed by Parliament and to avoid allowing "relationships between young people at different stages of sexual development."
Americans, take note of this: Since the UKSA decided to ally itself with the homosexual movement, Scouting membership in England has dropped by close to 20 percent. From 1997 to 2001, membership fell from 500,000 to 400,000. It had been as high as 650,000 in the 1980s.
There are consequences to political correctness. Among other things, it kills movements.
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Hans Zeiger is an Eagle Scout, president and founder of the Scout Honor Coalition and a student at Hillsdale College in Michigan. His new book, "Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America," can be pre-ordered from online booksellers
Why wait? Why not be one of the people that helps bring it to your state?
It is time to move past the BSA and create a private, non-publicly created enterprise. That way, maybe, the new organization will have the rights to exclude pedophiles from their ranks.
No, I don't. I have nothing agains promoting brotherhood among citizens of respective nations. However, "citizen" is a LEGAL term, identifying legal duties and responsibilities to a nation and its government. "Citizen of the world" therefore denotes fealty to a global government. Don't think for a second that these WAGGGS cheezes don't hold that objective.
Had you witnessed the duplicity, outright dishonesty, and cowardliness displayed by our local GSUSA over their plans to indoctrinate our children in politically correct sexuality, without our knowledge as parents, you might not take this so lightly.
Semi-invalid now. Organizing anything would really put me in a hospital.
I"m your wicked Uncle Ernie I guess you won't see or hear me as I fiddle about, fiddle about, fiddle about.
I believe air rifles are now out in the UK.
Better start Christian Boy and Girl Scout troops to avoid this kind of crap in the future. Too bad they're ruining what was a great organization. For shame.
Make that 'formerly great'.
When I was a scout, whoever had done the best since the last one, the scoutmaster would sleep in his tent, and he would be his assistant for that weekend. I got to be his assistant 4 times!
I forgot the /sarcasm tag. As much as the BSA gets pounded on as though they are under public scrutiny, it would seem they must not be a private organization.
Any public school that bans the BSA from using it's facilities will fall afoul of the Equal Access Act and the No Child Left Behind Act, unless that school bans ALL after-school organizations from meeting there.
The link you gave is just a bunch of links on www.bsa-discrimination.org. There is no information on that page regarding any banning of BSA units from public schools, public halls, or military facilities.
FYI: the settlement that the DoD reached with the ACLU bans military units from sponsoring BSA units. This is in accordance with the DoD's own policies, which some military units were ignoring, that military units were forbidden from sponsoring non-military organizations. However, there is no ban that prevents any BSA unit from using facilities on military bases, and units still do use such facilities.
You really should do some research before posting assertions such as those you've made. So far you've not given any evidence backing them up, and they are all incorrect.
At no point in the history of either the BSA or the British Boy Scouts were they intended to be an exclusively Christian organization. There have always been Hindus, Moslems, Mormons, and other non-Christian religions in the BSA and in the British Scouts.
It is, and it isn't. I have no problem with a private organization being exclusive. I have no problem joining private, exclusive organizations. And for those I cannot join, they are free to associate with certain people and not to associate with others, even I'm one of those "others".
The problem is, BSA enjoys special privileges that other private organizations do not enjoy. For example, our local public schools allow BSA to recruit during school hours, even having public school teachers distribute BSA information to the students. (Even though BSA has a religious requirement and does not admit nonreligious kids).
If it's OK for the BSA to use public school property and class time to recruit new members, what about the other private, exclusive, religious-oriented organizations that exclude certain children? I'm sure there are plenty of churches and temples and mosques that would love to have the same access to public school students.
So, on the one hand, BSA plays the "we're-a-private-organization" card so it can exclude certain people; but it behaves more like a gov't agency, enjoying special privileges that other private orgs. are not permitted.
If the BSA gets to use public property for their use is usually up to the public property administrators. Others can use the schools, too.
If you're saying that the Scoutmaster would sleep in a boy's tent and that boy was not his own son then that is wrong.
If you are saying that the Scoutmaster and youth traded tents (the boy got the BIGGER Scoutmaster's tent and the Scoutmaster took the boy's smaller tent) then that probably was ok.
BTW were there other adults out there also?
Oh, now, I highly doubt that... lol. Are you aware of any scout admitted by taking an oath to a tree? If so, then no one should have a problem joining the scouts. I could take my sons there right now and tell them we belong to the Church of Monday Night Football...
The liberals are brilliant at entering other people's institutions and turning them inside out. They are like termites. Let them in, let their ideas and values in, and before you know it, they're in charge and utterly destructive.
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