Gay scout leaders

zieak ♦ May 2, 2012 ♦ Leave Your Comment

I wrote the comments below when I signed the petition to urge the Boy Scouts to end their policy of discrimination against gay people.

For a decade I have been anticipating the scouts to change their policies. Some friends that are gay that have asked me how I could have been involved in an organization that held such a position regarding people that are gay. I guess I just feel like it is about time that I wasn’t just waiting for the organization to change. I need to say that I think the policy should be changed.

I worked at scout camps every summer from the year I was 14 through 20. I am an Eagle Scout. I was a scoutmaster. I worked at Philmont for a summer. I received the Vigil honor, Founder’s Award and Distinguished Service Award from the Order of the Arrow. I went to a national jamboree and a world jamboree.

I absolutely loved scouting.

But I am hesitant to have my 12 year old son involved in scouting. Solely because of the entrenched anti-gay sentiment that the organization has stuck to.

A number of friends that I made while in scouting are gay or bisexual. They were raised with similar heterosexual leaders as I had.

I understand and respect the decisions that a private organization may make. I am just disappointed that an organization that taught me to “help other people at all times” and made me pledge that I would be “mentally awake” still retains such a discriminatory practice.

In the words of Lord Baden Powell… Scouting’s “aim is to produce healthy, happy, helpful citizens, of both sexes, to eradicate the prevailing narrow self interest, personal, political sectarian and national, and to substitute for it a broader spirit of self-sacrifice and service in the cause of humanity”