A full and very lengthy disclosure first: I may be the only American male alive who flunked out of the Boy Scouts. Well, maybe “flunked out” isn’t quite the appropriate term. Let’s put it this way: I couldn’t pass the entrance exam.
No it had nothing to do with sexuality. My wiring determined
I would be born and remain straight.
I had to do with different wiring – the same attention deficit that
kept me a borderline student from second grade through college. When I was 10 —
or was it 11 or 12?— well anyway,
somewhere in that range, I went down to the neighborhood Boy Scout troop to join up.
“Do you know the Boy Scout Oath?” the local scoutmaster asked
me.
“No, I don’t,” I confessed.
“What about the Scout Law?”
“What’s that?”
I’m really, really
fuzzy on the next part. But I think I came home with something called The Boy
Scout Handbook. And I have the vague impression that the scoutmaster sold it to
me, although I wouldn’t swear to it on a stack of Bibles.
“Memorize the oath and the Law and come back next week.”
Well, I overcame my attention deficit enough to memorize, at
least for the moment, the oath. It’s the one that begins “On my honor I will do
my best…"
But the Law, essentially a string of a dozen adjectives, (“A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind,….” etcetera,
etcetera) eluded me. No matter how many times I read it aloud and repeated it
to myself, I couldn’t remember all the adjectives, and even when I thought I
had them all down, it would turn out I had them in the wrong order.
Gross insubordination
The scoutmaster listened, his frown extremely grave, and
then said, “No no, you haven’t memorized them. Come back next week.” I came
back for three weeks in a row, flunking Boy Scout Law each time. Finally I said “Screw you!”and walked out. It
was an act of gross
insubordination that would have gotten me thrown out of the Scouts in a
millisecond, had I ever gotten in.
To hell with it. I was never that interested in tying knots
anyway. If anything, I needed help untying knots, particularly the ones in my shoes. To this day, I don’t know a square
knot from a clove hitch from a lariat loop. (Although, during a very boring
junior high school science class, I do remember figuring out, all on my own and
without diagrams, how to tie a hangman’s noose.)
Maybe because I was never involved in scouting, I really
never saw the value in it. If you ask me, it’s often just an organized way of
frittering away time that ought to be spent on homework. Who the hell cares if
you can tie and know the names of fifty different knots or if you won a merit
badge in backpacking, bugling, or bird study?
Yes, I know there are merit badges for considerably more advanced
subjects, such as the Nuclear Science Merit Badge. Its requirements encourage
kids get close to “a radioactive source,” which sounds dangerous, or build a
model reactor, which I’m certain Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would heartily applaud.
Even so, “nuclear reactor” isn’t the first thing that generally comes to mind
when you think about the Boy Scouts, right?
On top of that, the Boy Scouts are pushing a kind of ecumenical religiosity, with scouts encouraged to earn merit badges in their own religions, from Baptist to Meher Baba. (Yes, traditionally discriminated-against religions, from Judaism to "Islamic" to Hinduism, to Zoroastrianism are also covered, although I can't find Scientology on the list.)
With that in mind, the current dustup over whether the Boy
Scouts should/should not/should be required to admit homosexuals leaves them in
a no-win situation.
Situation Impossible
Opt in favor of allowing gays to join, and the Scouts
will be in deep doo doo with lots of the churches that donate the use of their
basements to Scout meetings. And they’ll be pariahs in certain religious
communities. Opt against gays and the Scouts mark themselves as discriminatory,
uptight, and out-of-step.
Either way they go, somebody will declare them in
violation of their self-declared mission to “prepare young people to make
ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values
of the Scout Oath and Law.” Ditto if they make the admission of gays a local
option.
So I watch inflammatory bigots like this guy with more than
annoyance. He’s a worthless boob, trying to ban people who God wired for gay,
for reasons so specious and ridiculous that they’d be laughable if not for the
fact that the entire concept of Boy Scouts is starting to feel laughable. Maybe
the Boy Scouts made sense in the days of Norman Rockwell, who drew idealized America as Americans once ideally imagined ourselves.
These days, though, the Boy Scouts are just a bunch mostly well-meaning but silly people in silly uniforms, tormented by equally silly people with self-righteously
bigoted opinions.
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