Scouts at the barricades
By John Guthmiller
web
posted September 4, 2000
The homosexual lobby is turning up the pressure on the Boy Scouts of America to admit gays as troop leaders. The Scouts maintain that doing so violates their credo of moral straightness, and that they can't permit such behavior while remaining true to their charter. I salute the Scouts for standing their ground, even in the face of such base vilification.
No society needs to earn its egalitarian merit badge by tolerating every behavior. A culture is defined as much by what it proscribes as by what it advocates.
We're supposed to believe that this conflict is about inclusion, tolerance, diversity. But it's not. It's about government usurping the most personal of individual rights: the right of free association. If I am to be denied the right to choose my own companions, to walk life's road with those fellow travellers of my own choosing, then what right can't I be denied? A government so overbearing it presumes to pick my friends for me is a government out of control, whose citizens are its slaves.
Worse, we're slaves not to a transcendent authority or an uncomfortable logical dictum, but to the loudest whiner and the biggest crybaby. Our cultural identity is defined not by morality or absolutes, but by who can throw the most public tantrum.
Does denying homosexuals membership in the Boy Scouts deny them full inclusion? Absolutely. But not only is that exclusion permitted under the Constitution, it has a venerable history that reaches all the way back to secular and sacred orders of ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt. Every society has exclusive organizations, from Freemasons to cults for high priests and priestesses. Not many men entered the ranks of the Vestal Virgins, nor, for that matter, did many non-virgins.
Society may benefit from the forced inclusion of homosexuals in the Boy Scouts. Certainly, it opens one more door for homosexuals. But it does so by slamming another door, the one that leads to those chambers where we gather with people of like mind.
The
Boy Scouts have determined that homosexuality has no place in an organization
dedicated to moral rectitude. The question isn't whether homosexuality
is a character defect, but whether the Scouts – and by extension,
every other organization – is allowed to define it as such for their
own purposes.
Luckily, the Supreme Court has said yes, the Scouts are free to choose their own company, and, by their sanction or disapprobation, endorse certain acts and reject other.. Now comes the secondary campaign of hate and smear, as the ascendant homosexual lobby flexes its political muscle and tries to win in the marketplace what it lost in the courts. Once again, the Radical Left dispatches its dialectical storm troopers, its strike force against the status quo. This is less a battle over homosexuality and Boy Scouts than over destruction and conservation.
When my ancestors tortured a meager living from South Dakota's stubborn prairie, they often encountered alluvial rocks while they were plowing. They would unharness the horses, then spend hours digging out the stones, finally replacing the dulled plowshare before they resumed their toil.
The Boy Scouts are a stone in the left's furrow. But, like my forefathers discovered the hard way, sometimes those stones are the tip of a mountain. The Boy Scouts stand for something, something honorable and enduring and the left can't stand for that.
They must disrupt, contaminate, and destroy any vestiges of principle that may serve as redoubts for the stalwart partisans of convention. They will tramp around the walls blowing their horns and beating their shields until they've convinced the recalcitrant that their cause is just. If that fails, they'll just hold their breath till they turn blue, or fall to the ground in a public place kicking and screaming and yelling mean things.
This is simply another skirmish in the ongoing cultural war, and we won the first volley. The Scouts need to know that they're doing the right thing. The pressure on them will be enormous, as their organization is maliciously smeared by the spoiled wedge-drivers of the Left's favorite extremists.
The Scouts aren't condemning homosexuals, but the homosexuals are most stridently condemning the Scouts. Scouts aren't demanding to be let into the local leather bar. The are insisting on their right to form and maintain an association based on values they define, sometimes to the exclusion of others.
When the unstoppable force of godlessness collides with the immovable object of morality, it is morality that must always lose, according to the left's conceit. No-one is forbidding homosexuality. But non-homosexuality is under constant fire. The religion that rejects homosexuality is vilified in every medium of today's commerce. (Unless the Democrats need to borrow a halo until the election's over). In a feat of liberal sleight-of-hand, the moral parties are condemned for being judgmental.
The homosexuals' pressure on them is an attempt to force a conformity
of creed, an act that belies the Left's mantra of "diversity"
and "tolerance." The Boy Scouts, called to a duty beyond their
years, are at the barricades, standing as a bulwark against Leftist bigotry
and hate. We can't let these young men take a bullet meant for us. 
John Guthmiller is a freelance journalist, and a regular contributor to Ether Zone, and the NRA publication "America's First Freedom."