Scouts gone wrong

As a kid, I personally never much saw the point in boyscouts. Essentially, from my then juvenille perspective (not the cultured, infinately knowing and wise one I currently posess), it seemed a fairly convoluded way of getting fairly lame badges (and then sew them on yourself!)

Silly, but not nessicarily bad.

I do appretiate the basic idea behind their inception and existance however. Teaching young people responsability, teamwork, and lending them means of organization and structure are perfectly good ways to spend one's time. Nevermind the fact that they could likely gain the same attributes from a weekly soccer game.

Since then however, it seems like the scouts have gone downhill. Specifically, they've not so subtly mirrored the US military stance regarding inclusion of gays, that is to say, they're not allowed. The company line, reportedly, is something along the lines of "gay people present lifestyles and family choices that run contrary to scout princibles", or some other nonsense.

This biggoted exclusion is odd enough, but if you look even further into the scouts credoes, they actually have considerably more extreme stances. For example, the same restrictions on gays is applied to, wait for it, athiests. Athiests. Not just that, but anyone of a religion other than Christianity is given a considerable hassle. Evidently acceptance of Christ as your one lord and saviour is critical when it comes to developing your knot-tying skills.

Now, I'm opposed to this kind of needless exclusion, and the perpetuation of the bias that goes along with it, explicit or implicit (could you have guessed that one?), but hey, the scouts are a private club. As a result, they're perfectly within their rights to allow anyone in, and deny anyone else access. They don't, for example, let girls into the BoyScouts. That's just how it goes.

Then I learned something that blew my mind.

In the United States, the BoyScouts are financed, to a considerable degree, by the Federal government. Federal buildings are used by the Scouts at little or no charge. A scout jambouree is held every four years on a military base, costing the government over 3 million dollars. Beyond this, the Federal government directly funds the scouts as a "charity".

What this essentially means is that if you pay taxes in the United States, something most people do if their name isn't Al Capone, you are forced to fund, and implicitly support, the boyscouts, a homophobic, religiously zealous, private club.

My, what an excellent use of public money.