Boy Scouts: how many decades behind the Pentagon?

@ben somes: I have found the extreme blue/pink divide thing is pretty much a US phenomenon. Maybe we don't want to know the sex of our babies here as much so there are more neutral options, or maybe my wife buys nicer baby clothes than mall type stuff. I know we both love felt.co.nz which is crafty stuff, and lots of great kids clothes that don't cloy to the stereotypes quite so hard (girls can wear more than pink!)

Yeah, we don't really buy much clothing from the big chain stores like Babies R Us, because the selection sucks. We order a lot of stuff online, or go to our local Carter's store. They still have some gender-programming clothing, but they have a lot more neutral stuff than BRU.

I find the pink/blue divide really appalling, even when my cousins were babies 15-20 years ago it wasn't nearly so segregated and there were a lot more unisex options. Companies were proud to make things that were enjoyed by both boys and girls. I don't know why it's gotten so segregated, but it drives me crazy.

At a guess, manufacturing an identity bond between sex and color increases the chance that the parent will buy a toy at all? The more you identify things with each other the stronger your association with them. Or something? This is just a guess.

On the plus side, it really confuses people when you tell them that pink used to be the boys' colour and blue the girls'.

ObTopic and answering a question a few pages back: Yes, the Mormon Church has made a concerted and deliberate effort over the last couple of decades to, essentially, take over the American Boy Scouts and the shifts in attitudes therein can be linked back to that change of leadership.

Not for a while yet:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/us/boy-scouts-reaffirm-ban-on-gay-members.html

Their statement:
http://www.scouting.org/Media/PressReleases/2012/20120717.aspx

You tried, you failed. Now would be a good time to back that up with money.

You can disagree cordially. You can even try to work within the system. But you can't stand for overt bigotry and expect the "life-changing benefits" to be anything but warped by association (at best). They are molding future generations that will either have to be ashamed of their involuntary complicity further down the road or assholes for life, which is not a happy fate. But, of course, the second option is the point.

Biggest Boy Scout Group In Minnesota To Stay Inclusive

The headline is the good news -- basically the council that runs a big chunk of regional Scouting said, "Yeah, we're not going to hate on gays for no reason. Shrug." So that's nice.

I had a great facepalm later on in the article, though, when the paper starts man on the street quotes:

a) FUCK YOU
b) Seriously, fuck you. Is it 1950, where we still think that gay men are all child molesters? Jesus Christ.
c) Super bonus fuck you for having the god damn shame to not want your name attached to your shitty bigoted statement in the biggest newspaper in the region, but still making shitty bigoted remarks.
d) In closing, fuck you.

So, if you search in Google for "bullshit boy scouts" or "penn and teller boy scouts" you might get some results. Specifically results from YouTube. It would be wrong and illegal to recommend that you watch them, because these are a stolen episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit that's all about what's wrong with the BSA. So I won't do that.

However, the first episode of the fourth season of Bullshit is all about the Boy Scouts of America and it kind of made me really pissed off for a whole bunch of reasons.

That's the council that my former troop is in. So that's nice.

It also lends credence to what a few people have said in this thread -- each troop and council do things there own way so acceptance of atheism and homosexuality vary from place to place and are not uniform throughout the organization (though, yeah their official policy is bullshit).

Fuck Penn & Teller, they're Randroids. If they didn't want me to watch their shows on Youtube, they should have gotten the Free Market to stop me.

(/derail)

I've been trying to find information on this and I've come across a few articles and the global scouting community seems fairly pro-gay. One article said that the last Worlwide Jamboree had numerous discussion groups for both leaders and members about how to improve the organisation for it's gay members. I don't know if it was a national scouting magazine or an international scouting magazine even had an article about the findings of a lot of those discussion groups. Canada's scouting organisation has said the American view is anathema to theirs. Is there any official global policy, or is global scouting made up of independent national member organisations rather than being a unified thing with America in opposition to default views.

A representative for the Swedish Gay Scouts, a network within the Swedish Scouts, said that they're working at persuading the American Scouts and is hoping for a change within the next decade. I think that might be a bit optimistic and far more dependent on domestic politics in the US than pressure from other scout movements.
Apparently there was a congress in 2011 where they tried to get a resolution about human rights (including respect for sexual orientation) through, but it's been tabled until the next congress in 2014. It did pass as a "recommendation," though. Page 7 here: http://scout.org/en/content/downloa... Youth Forum To The World Scout Committee.pdf
Source.

Saw this on Facebook today:



Edit: and another one:



This may get to be a thing. I'm considering doing it.

Damn you Dean. Normally I can avoid all the misty-eyed videos and stuff that people post here by hiding behind my stoic veneer but this one, probably because of my family's history with scouting, got me. So damn you. And thank you.

I only made it to Life Scout and my son's only just entered Bear Scouts but I'm going to be doing it with my old cap (as I lost the shirt & patch years ago) and his scarf.

"Conscience", Martin. Conscience.

Remember those Eagle Scout letters upthread? Yeah, it's become a thing.

I haven't read every one of those, but I'm incredibly impressed by how thoughtful, heartfelt and intelligent they are without sounding formulaic. It seems like they would have been prone to sounding like a campaign of form letters, so I have to imagine (and hope) these are sending a powerful message to the BSA leadership. Assuming, you know, anyone there is actually reading them.

Well.

In that case it seems like it's more of a case of predators deliberately circumventing the measures taken, as opposed to the Catholic Church, where they knew there was a problem and *didn't* expel anyone.

If they weren't so concerned about keeping gays out, they might have done a better job keeping the known pedos out.

So they got detailed allegations of sexual molestation and didn't bring them to the police?

Yeah, class act that totally safeguards children.

We call that one the "Joe Paterno."

Yeah, but "better anti-pedophile measures than the Catholic Church" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

Yeah, but any organization that works with children I imagine has to deal with this sort of thing, unfortunately.

Yeah

Hellooooo, dirty laundry.

So one instance of showing Cub Scouts - and these are younger than Boy Scouts - porn is OK, as long as he isn't caught doing it again? How could anyone have read and approved that???

It is fucking insane that Boy Scouts of America hasn't been completely disbanded over this shit.

First off, fuck them.

Second off, just as a little extra info, per an NPR interview, the current leaders say they've improved things since the 1980s, and that the files include lots of unsubstantiated things because they didn't require anything like reasonable doubt before they "took action" (whatever the heck that means in context). So in some cases, the allegations may not have been substantial enough for reportage with the accompanying life-altering effects, but still substantial enough to be included in the files as an internal heads up.

Don't get me wrong, I think all allegations of this sort need to be taken seriously, but it's a fact that kids' statements need to be evaluated deeper than face value. And if I remember right, this was the era of witch hunts in private schools and daycares over "Satanic" cults based on kids' allegations (which often turned out to be affected/influenced/invented for the adults listening), so maybe they were consciously trying to avoid that. See: http://www.skepdic.com/satanrit.html

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1209vs/over_14500_pages_of_the_boy_scouts/

HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT!

Let me guess.. You found a reddit article for something someone already posted?

(haha, reddit article on pedophilia)

I heard all that I needed to hear when they had an official response from the Boy Scouts on NPR about the one allegation in which a scout leader slept naked with the scouts and shared porn with them, and the Scouts' explained that it didn't seem like a serious enough transgression to throw the guy out of the organization. At that point, it doesn't even matter whether or not the allegation is true or substantiated, or when it happened. Because we have the Scouts on the record, today, saying that they don't think that sort of thing sounds all that bad.

Fuck the Boy Scouts.

No, I found someone who read them. Me, I couldn't be bothered up to work up a care log large enough to actually open one.

Boy scouts :(
http://projectqueer.tumblr.com/post...-troop-drops-gay-inclusive-non-discrimination

On the other hand:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...ose-to-ending-ban-on-gay-members-leaders?lite

We'll see.

I'm not going to hold my breath. Considering the context of the article that Anders linked, it may just be a bunch of hot air intended to deflect criticism over their policies.

Universal love, baby.

God damn it. So they make some wiggles in the right direction then get thwapped on the hands by their sponsors?