That $250 Glass of Boy Scout (Sour?) Lemonade

No doubt, you'll hear this story recounted through the holiday weekend. CNN even has one of their incredibly irrelevant polls asking if you would pay $250 for lemonade to help the Scouts. Yet some of those lemons seem a tad sour to me in a way that no amount of sugar will conceal.

Until that decision about not allowing acknowledged homosexuals to be part of Boy Scouts, my opinion of Boy Scouts was almost as high as that of Girl Scouts (which has a slightly more liberal tradition, understanding that empowering young girls to make smart choices is a valuable aspect of a girls' organization). Legally, I don't believe you can force a private organization to accept members that it does not choose to accept but morally, you'd like to think the organization could do better.

Ironically, in my youth, the only case I knew of "abuse" among a Boy Scout leader was a heterosexual male with homosexual urges that he acted out with the boys he befriended. All of it was kept quite hush until the man was ushered off to the state hospital. I've never heard a similar case under acknowledged homosexual scouts or scoutmasters.

I don't see the value or "protection" in keeping gays out of Scouts, anymore than I believe in that foolish, "don't ask-don't tell" with the military. Nothing makes a gay less capable. Such measures are just done to placate the extremists who feel they can exclude gays until gays "decide" to become non-gays. This should work as well as all those old parochial school teachers who forced us left-handers to use their right hand because "left handed is bad": it introduces shame about a natural condition and sure reduces the overall human experience for no good reason.

What I knew of the Boy Scouts, through the people who ran programs at the local and chapter level, of its ideals, and practices (mostly through my brothers and friends who were involved), they themselves would probably not exclude gays... that whole "morally straight" component of the creed notwithstanding. I do wish, however, that senior management would see it differently than they do. It's cheating gays as well as the Boy Scout population as a whole.