By John F. Di Leo -
The Boy Scouts of America have filed for bankruptcy protection. While they may survive in some revised form, smaller and weaker than before, the Boy Scouts of old, as a great institution in American life, may be no more.
Frankly, they have been on a downward trajectory for some time. In a world in which consumer-electronics, from cell phones to game consoles, have taken over the entertainment options for children, modernity itself contributed greatly to the Boy Scouts’ decline.
But there is a difference between a weakening and a destruction… a difference between the natural loss of popularity and a concerted effort to destroy.
Left alone, the Boy Scouts might never again have approached the saturation they had at their peak (4 million members in 1973, half that today in a much more populous country).
A 50” television in the family room, with Wii, Switch or PS4, surrounded by friends and snacks, heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, was bound to beat the old-fashioned allure of hiking in the woods, risking poison ivy, and shivering at night in a tent… for many boys, anyway, if not for all.
But that is only the easy explanation… the explanation that doesn’t require addressing the politics of the ongoing attack on the Boy Scouts that has lasted for a generation. In fact, there’s much more to it than that.
For one thing, the Boy Scouts were never really just about camping. While Lord Baden-Powell certainly built his Boy Scout movement around outdoorsmanship and its associated skills, the Boy Scouts have always been about two other important things as well:
First is friends. Boy Scout troupes are about good kids getting together with other good kids.
In a much different context than the classroom or an organized sport, these boys get together weekly and build friendships doing something different every week, in an atmosphere that is gently supportive of western civilization and Judeo-Christian values. It’s not like church or synagogue, or a political meeting, but the respect for what is known as the “great Protestant Work Ethic,” and the traditional values of our Anglo-American culture, have always been at the core of every Boy Scout meeting.
Second is education. You might not expect it going in, with 95% of the pictures in our minds being of lines of boys in gym shoes or hiking boots, walking in forest trails or paddling in kayaks. But the Boy Scouts have always been designed to provide a surprisingly broad education, one that you would not get in school, one that you could only get on your own if you read voraciously and experimentally.
The assortment of merit badges is incredibly varied, ranging from archaeology to painting, from architecture to welding, from chemistry to veterinary medicine. Scouting offers an introductory exposure to skills and careers that the cookie-cutter classrooms of America’s grammar schools have never provided. Countless children have chosen careers after their youthful interest was piqued by these preliminary studies as cubs or boy scouts.
So, sure, scouting seems – from the outside – like it’s all about camping… but it has always been about so much more. The slow death of Scouting has meant the slow death of all these other opportunities for young men as well.
Politically, the Left is therefore very proud today, because they have successfully claimed a scalp that they were after for decades. And the effort to slowly destroy scouting – through messing with its rules and bleeding them with lawsuits – has used America’s conflicted views on human sexuality as the murder weapon.
On the one hand, scouting long ago recognized the risk inherent in camping trips, if predatory assistant scoutmasters, den leaders, or fellow scouts were allowed close proximity to potential targets, far away from the protection of their families.
Scouting therefore did the responsible thing: reducing this risk by banning known, public (out) homosexuals from participation. This may seem cruel and unfairly prejudiced (admittedly, writing it down here on paper, this writer certainly feels discomfort), but it’s the only practical way for a struggling nonprofit (and yes, all such groups are always struggling) to deal rationally with this clear risk. It was a well-intentioned effort.
It is not a perfect world, and they were doing the best they could to reduce this risk.
On the other hand… we live in a society today in which the genuine rights of the potential victim are secondary to the imagined rights of the sexual actor. Yes, our society does not want the child abused… But, much more important, at least to one side of the aisle, is that the sexually active must not be restrained in any way from either their desired activity or the opportunity to pursue it. To the political Left, the right of a potential victim to be free of abuse is less important than the right of a sexual actor to enjoy all the opportunities in life he wants.
In short, America’s conflict on these matters is what’s killing the Boy Scouts.
Fear of lawsuits caused them to retreat from sensible precautions; the lawsuits continued anyway.
The retreat contributed to the membership decline, and the crushing burden of lawsuits put the final nail in the coffin.… despite all their best efforts over a hundred years, despite providing a successful experience for 110 million American boys in that time.
This brings us to what is likely the most important lesson of this debacle, though whether society will learn anything from it is an open question.
We have two primary ways of punishing criminals in this country: jail time and financial damages.
Get convicted of robbery, murder, drug dealing, etc., and you will be jailed. Abuse children within the statute of limitations, and you can also be jailed.
But… if the victim waits until the statute of limitations has passed, so that jail time is no longer an option, then our society believes, insanely, that the right punishment should be for the criminal’s employer or volunteer organization to be bankrupted by outrageous financial settlements.
This is not to say that the victims do not objectively deserve redress. Obviously, you cannot put a price on the mental scarring resulting from physical abuse. The criminal who caused such abuse should be punished – with jail time.
But to be practical, we must recognize that it is utterly unfair for the organization, its leadership and the thousands of members who are innocent, to be financially destroyed, and for those honest citizens to be deprived of their hobbies and even their vocation, just because one or two criminals wormed their way into their midst.
If the story seems familiar, it should.
This is exactly how the Left has attacked America’s churches in recent decades. Yes, there have been some very bad apples… There have been awful pederasts and pedophiles, who have taken advantage of their proximity to vulnerable children to commit crimes. Some churches, especially the Catholic Church, appeared to have deep enough pockets that they could afford the lawsuit process.
Like the scouts, these churches have put up with it, paying out millions of dollars – of their members and donors’ money – selling off properties to fund this extortion… continually failing to have the sense to take to the public square, and make the moral case that the lawsuit method is itself morally wrong as a path to redress this particular class of crime.
In the end, lawsuits need to be limited primarily to the perpetrators themselves.
This process – this reverse class action approach – where one victim sues not just the abuser but his employers, friends, acquaintances, and everyone else he knew, is itself evil, at least as evil as the crime of abuse itself.
Think of it. In numerous cases over the years, an abuser – a scoutmaster’s assistant in a troop of 200, for example, or a priest or coach – should certainly have been jailed for 20 years.
Instead, the criminal abuser himself serves no time, but the thousands of children who wanted to take part in an excellent organization are denied the opportunity forever by these destructive lawsuits.
All over the country, churches, scouting troops, and other organizations like them are being driven out of business, through this one single, evil threat.
If this cancer isn’t stopped, there will eventually only be one type of association allowed in the United States – the one type that can be made virtually immune to lawsuits – the government association.
This is the statists’ goal, though they’d never admit it out loud: to crush private sector associations so that the only “safe” gathering places are those run by government – the local school district’s school groups, the local city-run sports league, the local park district’s activities.
This is as significant a part of America’s ongoing civil war than its more blatantly political aspects.
America was built on the private sector, and private associations have always been a huge part of both our culture and our success.
And yes, these lawsuit-based attacks on both our churches and our scout troops have been part and parcel of the Left’s assault on America’s tradition of private associations.
Copyright 2020 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. He was a Cub Scout and then Boy Scout himself, active in scouting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the troops attached to Evanston’s Oakton School and St. Nicholas School, and finally Park Ridge’s Mary Seat of Wisdom School, though John left scouting when he left to attend Marmion Military Academy for high school.
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