Secular Absolutism and the Boy Scouts - PhillyBlog

Eagle Scout · #1 (**permalink**) 02-07-2005, 03:16 PM

Looks like a reporter at the Inquirer is using advocacy journalism to push for the Scouts to get the boot from their headquarters.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/n...al/9147428.htm

Quote:

Posted on Wed, Jul. 14, 2004

No movement on threat by city to evict Boy Scouts

By Linda K. Harris
Inquirer Staff Writer

A year ago, the Boy Scouts of America's Cradle of Liberty Council lost its funding from local charitable organizations.

A few months later, Philadelphia officials threatened to revoke its rent-free lease on its stately headquarters.

The Boy Scouts promised to come up with a policy that would not violate the antidiscrimination policies of both the city and the charitable organizations.

Today, the Cradle of Liberty Council still has its headquarters at 22d and Winter Streets in Center City, and the city has not pressed the issue.

"It is a concern of ours that an organization that benefits from the city continues to have a discriminatory policy," said Stacey L. Sobel, executive director of Philadelphia's Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights.

"It's our hope that one day the Boy Scouts will accept all people who would like to participate in its activities, regardless of their sexual orientation. Until that time, it is our responsibility to educate the Boy Scouts and work toward ending their discriminatory policies."

Barbara Grant, spokeswoman for Mayor Street, said that no movement had been made on the issue because city officials had been focused on putting together the 2005 budget.

"We've just come out of an intense budget season," Grant said. "All of our attention was riveted on that."

Last fall, City Solicitor Nelson A. Diaz issued an opinion that the Boy Scouts were in violation of the city's fair-practices ordinance, which forbids discrimination. The issues arose because of the Boy Scouts' use of city property near Logan Circle for their headquarters.

In January, the last of a series of meetings were held with city officials, led by Joyce Wilkerson, Street's chief of staff. At the time, the Boy Scouts leadership was talking of plans to adopt a policy similar to one that is used in New York. That policy states that "prejudice, intolerance and unlawful discrimination in any form are unacceptable."

That policy, however, has not been formally adopted by the Cradle of Liberty Council.

The council serves 87,000 members in Philadelphia, Montgomery and Delaware Counties and is the third-largest in the country.

Without a new policy, the Boy Scouts have not been able to motivate either the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania or the Pew Charitable Trusts to restore their funding.

The United Way met with representatives of Cradle of Liberty last month. Mary Strasser, the United Way's vice president for community impact, said the Boy Scouts were told that the money that had been allocated for distribution in 2003 was being given to other youth groups.

In June 2003, Pew revoked a $100,000 grant to the Boy Scouts because of the discriminatory policy. In July, the United Way followed suit and revoked the second half of a $400,862 award, but had been holding it for the Boy Scouts, should the issue be resolved.

"They have floated some policy language, but it doesn't fully comply with our nondiscriminatory policy," Strasser said.

Further, she said, "what we told them was the board felt that there wasn't sufficient evidence in their policies and practices to demonstrate that the Cradle of Liberty Boy Scout Council was able to comply with the United Way's nondiscrimination policy."

But Strasser noted that an allocation was set aside in a future budget in case the Boy Scouts change their policy.

The United Way's contribution represents a substantial portion of Cradle of Liberty's $6.2 million yearly budget.

Revising the policy is the Boy Scouts' goal, said William T. Dwyer III, Cradle of Liberty's scout executive. Dwyer, however, said he could not provide a copy of the Scouts' updated policy. He did say the city had given them language that it wanted to see, and the Scouts had incorporated that into the policy.

"We've done what we're asked to do, and now we're waiting to see what happens," Dwyer said.

No further meetings are scheduled with either the city or the United Way.

In the spring of 2003, the Cradle of Liberty Council expelled a Life Scout after he announced he was gay during the national convention held here last year.

The council did adopt a more liberal, inclusive policy, but the national Boy Scouts of America leadership demanded that the local council rescind the policy, and the council adhered to the demand.

SurfDog · #2 (**permalink**) 02-07-2005, 03:18 PM

I much prefer this article:

Quote:

http://webreprints.djreprints.com/946700458470.html

Wall Street Journal
March 10, 2004

Secular Absolutism

Secular absolutism is becoming the most potent religious force in America. Just ask the Boy Scouts and Catholic Charities, which both fell afoul of secular orthodoxy and then found judges willing to punish them for it.

Start with Catholic Charities. The California Supreme Court just ruled that the social-services arm of the Roman Catholic Church must include contraceptives coverage to women as part of any prescription drug benefit it extends to employees. When Catholic Charities insisted that as an avowedly Catholic organization it fit the religious exemption provided by the law in question, the court simply said it was not a religious organization. Catholic Charities?

Leave aside the irony that of all America's Catholic institutions, Catholic Charities is arguably the most liberal and sympathetic to secular crusades. Even that didn't protect them. Nor did its practice of employing people outside the Catholic faith — which was used here as reason for denying its religious claims. If the state can order a Catholic organization to include contraceptive coverage as part of its health benefits or drop all drug coverage, it's not hard to see where that's leading. This is what passes for civil liberties now.

The lone dissent in this 6-1 decision came from Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Judge Brown, nominated by President Bush for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, has been pilloried for refusing to bow before this increasingly stifling liberal orthodoxy. As she tartly noted in her decision here, the California high court has "such a crabbed and constricted view of religion that it would define the ministry of Jesus Christ as a secular activity."

Compare this ruling with what's going on with the Boy Scouts. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the Scouts' appeal of a Connecticut decision to kick them off a list of charities on its state-worker voluntary-donation plan. Meanwhile the American Civil Liberties Union has routed the Scouts in San Diego.

In a settlement reached earlier this year with the ACLU, San Diego agreed to revoke a Scouts lease for public campgrounds, where the Scouts have had a presence since 1918 and a formal lease since 1957. The city also agreed to pay the ACLU a whopping $950,000 for its efforts.

The Boy Scouts are suing, and they will not actually be evicted until the courts have ruled on all the outstanding issues and the litigation has been settled. But their opponents cite previous briefs in which the Scouts used the words "religious organization" to describe themselves as an association of believers and explain why they could not admit atheists. Never mind that by this broad definition, the Continental Congress that signed the Declaration of Independence would be a "religious organization."

Twisting these words, the ACLU contends that leasing the Scouts public lands is tantamount to the public establishment of religion. Silly as that might sound — and the civil rights division of the Justice Department agrees with the Scouts here — the argument received a huge boost when a federal judge decreed that the Scouts are a religious organization and that the leases do raise Establishment Clause concerns, a decision that no doubt led to the city's decision to settle.

Never mind that the Scouts have not discriminated against, or even been accused of discriminating against, anyone who has sought to use the campgrounds they maintain. Their real crime is to have won the Supreme Court case involving their First Amendment right not to admit an openly homosexual Scoutmaster. Ever since, a liberal jihad has been launched to strip them of any public association. As another federal judge put it in that Connecticut case the Supremes have just refused to hear, the Scouts "pay a price" for exercising their First Amendment rights.

All this is being done notwithstanding that the results will leave people worse off than they were before. The easiest way for Catholic Charities to comply, for example, would be by withdrawing all its prescription drug benefits. Its female employees will end up with fewer benefits than now. And you can bet the people of San Diego will be worse off with the Scouts no longer maintaining those campgrounds.

What's going on here is an effort by liberal activists and their judiciary enablers to turn one set of personal mores into a public orthodoxy from which there can be no dissent, even if that means trampling the First Amendment. Any voluntary association that doesn't comply — the same little platoons once considered the bedrock of American freedom — will be driven from the public square. Meet the new face of intolerance.

Eagle Scout · #3 (**permalink**) 02-07-2005, 03:24 PM

http://www.eurekareporter.com/Stories/op-01260503.htm

Quote:

January 26, 2005
Boy Scout battle is about American values
By Thomas P. Cadmus

"To those who cite the First Amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions every day, I say: the First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny." – Ronald Reagan

The Department of Defense issued an absurd warning to U.S. military installations last fall to throttle back support of the Boy Scouts.

The gesture was only "partial settlement" of a bigger lawsuit still hot on the agenda of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has made a target of the Scouts in recent years. The ACLU, of course, wants much more than one little victory in its battle against American values.

The point has been made that DoD merely reminded its duty-station commanders of a long-ignored policy against direct sponsorship of outside organizations. Routine business.

Fewer than 450 Boy Scout troops would be affected, about half of them overseas, where the children of military parents can simply find sponsorship elsewhere. No big deal.

On the contrary, it is a big deal, one that is symptomatic of a larger assault on faith and its place in our free society. Patriotic Americans are justifiably concerned that the "rest of the settlement" with the ACLU resides somewhere near the bottom of a deep and slippery slope.

The ACLU ostensibly wants the Boy Scouts removed from public places because some words in the Scout oath refer to the existence of a higher power. ACLU lawyers contend that even a nondenominational reference to God is a misuse of tax dollars, even a violation of law.

Let's extend the logic. If a military base cannot sponsor a Scout troop because God is merely referenced in the oath, what is the future of military chaplaincies, where God is the main point?

Will it become a violation for a soldier, lying burnt and wounded in the belly of a blood-soaked, government-owned Humvee, to pray for his life? And if he should die on the battlefield, should that soldier be denied last rites from a chaplain who receives military pay?

The ACLU's argument would suggest Americans ought not recognize the president of the United States, whose oath of office is recited with right hand on the Bible.

The vice president, members of Congress and U.S. Supreme Court justices would likewise be invalidated because their oaths conclude with the words, "So help me God."

If this sounds ridiculous, consider the hell the ACLU has raised over the presence of a solitary cross that has been standing for 70 years at the Mojave Desert Veterans Memorial in California to honor World War I soldiers.

Consider the ACLU's ongoing attempt to strike God from the Pledge of Allegiance. Consider the tax dollars ACLU attorneys receive from local governments when these topics are debated in court. Talk about misuse of public funds.

Organizations like the Boy Scouts help make this one nation of ours, this nation under God, a little more indivisible. The DoD, by rolling over to the ACLU, moves a step toward erasing faith from the U.S. military.

And when you're fighting a war, as we are today, sometimes that's all you have.

(Thomas P. Cadmus is national commander of the 2.7 million-member American Legion, the nation's largest wartime veterans’ organization and one of the largest sponsors of Scouting in the country.)

SurfDog · #4 (**permalink**) 02-07-2005, 03:29 PM

There were two replies to the article

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/9201729.htm

Quote:

Language in limbo

After reading the July 14 article "No movement on threat by city to evict Boy Scouts," I felt it was necessary to respond to several points regarding the status of talks between the Cradle of Liberty Council, the city, and the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania on a policy that will not violate antidiscrimination policies.

The Cradle of Liberty Council is committed to a policy and environment of nondiscrimination. The Council has formally adopted membership policy language modeled on that of the New York City Boy Scout Council, which was recommended to us by the city. New York was faced with a similar challenge involving the rights of gay scouts. Months ago, this approved language was returned to the city which, as Mayor Street's spokeswoman confirmed, has yet to act on it. (The feedback we've heard has been favorable.)

The Inquirer article says that the Boy Scouts "could not provide a copy of the Scouts' updated policy," which implies the policy does not exist. We cannot provide the language to the news media before the city has formally completed its review. For us to do so would be unfair to the parties involved.

As a result of these protracted negotiations, our children are suffering. The delays are frustrating our fund-raising efforts and are threatening the survival of our inner-city scouting programs. We hope to resolve this situation as soon as possible so that we may continue to be a positive force in the lives of thousands of children.

David Lipson
Chairman,
Cradle of Liberty Council
Philadelphia

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/9242730.htm

Quote:

Scouts' rights violated

Reading The Inquirer, one would think that people were in the streets marching on City Hall demanding the ouster of the Scouts from their headquarters ("No movement on threat by city to evict Boy Scouts," July 14). Why hasn't the City of Philadelphia pressed the issue? Perhaps it's because of all the good that Scouts do in the community. Very few other organizations have a track record that matches Scouting.

I, and many other volunteers, disagree with the Scouts' stand on homosexual participation - issues of adult sexuality have no place in the operation of a youth leadership program. What I support is the Scouts' right to determine membership standards. The Scouts have been made to pay a price for standing up for their constitutional rights.

Duty to one's country is a pillar of Scouting. The Supreme Court found no fault with the way the Scouts determine membership. But it seems that since the membership standards of Scouting have been deemed as politically incorrect, it's OK to attack them. This is despite all the good work they do.

Local Scout leaders want to get past this issue because it detracts from the issue of serving youth in the Delaware Valley. However, the national Boy Scouts office already has shown that it would dissolve the local leadership and then reconstitute it with people who follow the party line.

Attacking Scouting on the local level only hurts local kids. Will Rogers once said, "The problem with Boy Scouts is there aren't enough of them." I wonder what Rogers would say about the intolerant attitudes facing Scouting today?

Bruce Andersen
Philadelphia