How Long Will Christians Support the Boy Scouts?

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How Long Will Conservative Christians Continue to Support the Boy Scouts?

It was bad enough when the Boy Scouts named war criminal Robert Gates as its president. Now he is calling for the ban on gay scout leaders to be ended. How long will conservative Christians continue to support the Boy Scouts? The ban on gay scout members has already been lifted. There are, of course, other reasons to avoid the Boy Scouts, as these LRC articles here and here, and this blog post, point out.

And how strange that an organization with a former secretary of defense as its president has banned the use of water guns.
-Laurence Vance


https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/how-long-will-conservative-christians-continue-to-support-the-boy-scouts/

[Ross]

BOY SCOUTS' 'CAVE' ONLY THE BEGINNING, WARNS AUTHOR

Paul Kengor: Collapsing culture redefining human life itself

Robert Gates, the national president of the Boy Scouts of America, has surrendered in one of the key battles of the culture war by declaring the organization's ban on openly homosexual adults "cannot be sustained."

Paul Kengor, a professor of political science and author of "Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage," warned the latest triumph by activists is a testament to the effectiveness of political terror.

In an interview with WND, Kengor said it's "really a shame about the Boy Scouts."

"Their oath forever has been about obeying God and being physically and morally straight and strong. It's their motto. That has been torched," he said.

"They've caved to the forces of 'tolerance' and 'diversity' who relentlessly picket and harass and attack and sue and scream at and demonize and dehumanize and destroy those who disagree with their completely new configurations of marriage, family, sexuality, and even morality itself."

Gates, former secretary of defense under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, indicated fear of legal battles was the reason he was urging a change in policy.

Read "Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America," by Hans Zeiger

Gates' objection to the ban on homosexual adults in the organization was mostly framed in tactical rather than moral terms. It is evidence, observed Kengor, of the power of fear to drive once conservative organizations to surrender.

"The Boy Scouts have shown themselves to be just as craven as all the other organizations that the gay-marriage brigades target," Kengor charged. "When not even the Boy Scouts have courage anymore, America can rest in peace."

What do YOU think? Sound off on the Boy Scouts president calling for "gay" Scout leaders

Gates' assessment doesn't take into account the U.S. Supreme Court's affirmation in 2000 that as a private organization, the Boy Scouts were allowed the First Amendment right of expressive association.

That meant the BSA is legally allowed to set qualifications for membership and for leaders, including to exclude homosexuals.

The case that reached the Supreme Court was brought by James Dale, who joined in 1978 and eventually became an Eagle Scout. He then worked as an adult volunteer, but in 1990, his registration was revoked by the Monmouth Scout Council.

Demanding to know why, he was told by Council Executive James Kay that homosexuals were forbidden membership, and he had been co-president of his university's "gay" and lesbian campus organization. He sued on the basis of a New Jersey state nondiscrimination law.

The state court dismissed his case, noting homosexual behavior, biblically and historically, has been condemned.

The ruling said the BSA was a private group and was entitled to freedom of association guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates

While New Jersey's Superior and Supreme Courts both sided with the homosexual, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the trial court, noting the Boy Scout organization "believes homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the values it seeks to instill in its youth members."

On the current position adopted by Gates, Kengor noted the now widespread acceptance of radical ideas surrounding human sexuality and said, "The left loves this."

Michael Brown, who holds a Ph.D. from New York University and has researched and written a number of books on homosexuality, says he is not surprised by the Scouts.

"I said from the start that gay activists would not stop at having openly homosexual boys in the Boy Scouts, but now it's openly homosexual leaders."

Brown, whose books include "Can You Be Gay and Christian?" and the upcoming "Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Where Homosexual Activism Is Really Going and How to Turn the Tide," believes if the Boy Scouts accept openly homosexual leaders, they will cease to be a positive moral force in the lives of American boys.

"This sets a wrong role model for these kids," Brown told WND.

Yet, Brown says parents should have further concerns.

"This opens the door for sexual predators, a real danger, and it opens the door for gay boys to be flirting with straight boys under the auspices of the Boy Scouts," he said.

Given the new direction of the Boy Scouts, Brown urges parents to seek out an alternative.

"Now would be a great time to find out more about the Christian boy scouts alternative, Trail Life USA."

Kengor suggests the collapse of the Boy Scouts that is even affecting what is taught in schools.

He highlights a recent report from Fairfax County Public Schools that advocates not only teaching about homosexuality and bisexuality to middle- and high-school students, but the theory of "gender fluidity."

This theory holds gender is entirely a social construct, and there is actually no such thing as boys or girls.

Kengor sees the government's acceptance and promotion of once fringe theories as the inevitable outcome of growing secularization.

"We live in a rapidly secularizing culture that is destroying and fundamentally transforming things as basic as male and female. The differences and complementarity between male and female, boy and girl, mom and dad, is one of the beautiful things ordained by nature and nature's God," he said.

And Kengor believes the left's secular ideology necessitates the elimination of natural differences any other generation would have taken for granted.

"The natural differences between men and women are the very basis of male-female marriage and the natural-traditional-biblical family, and that's precisely why the secular left and progressives must annihilate these differences," he said.

"Our culture arrogantly redefines marriage, family and even human life itself. Why not redefine 'boys' and 'girls' while we're at it? It all goes together – all peas in the same uprooted pod."

Kengor warns America the caving by the scouting group is just the beginning. Without the grounding of a life based on morality, he says, rebels will challenge nature and reality itself in ever more outlandish ways.

"When you reject God and moral absolutes in ... setting boundaries, then anything is possible. Dostoyevsky wrote that when God does not exist, everything is permissible. We're seeing that in America today."

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/boy-scouts-cave-only-the-beginning-warns-author/#A52t17IyiVyGWudP.99