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The virtuous image of the Boy Scouts has traditionally been exploited by celebrities. In films, for instance, it has been invoked from the Marx Brothers to Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis. Michael Jackson, the rock star, who was never a Boy Scout, instituted the "Michael Jackson Good Scout Humanitarian Award" in 1991 for the Los Angeles Area Boy Scout Council. Lord Robert Baden-Powell, lieutenant general in the British army and hero of the siege of Mafeking (1899-1900) during the Beer War, founded the Boy Scouts in 1908, and they were imported into the United States in 1910. Since that time they consistently have attempted to live up to an ideal image in which they do good deeds--scouts save about one hundred lives per year--tie knots, tent in the woods, explore, and learn about compasses and nature, for which they earn merit badges. They were given a charter by the U.S. Congress in 1916 and report on their activities to a joint committee of the Congress each year. The Boy Scouts receive no public money, although they sometimes enjoy free rooms in public schools for meetings and ceremonies. Separate public schools sponsor the largest number, 1.1 million scouts, which some consider an indirect form of public support. The 402 local Boy Scout councils administer the program and are funded locally. They receive money through registration fees, donations from private individuals, special fund drives, and from a variety of other sources. Local civic organizations, such as chapters of the American Legion and the Lions Club, donate money and facilities. Something like one-quarter of their income is said to come from United Way campaigns. Revenue sources include a healthy publishing company and a mail-order supply operation that netted $2 million and $12 million respectively in fiscal 1990. The program owns land, buildings, and equipment valued at over $44 million. The Mormon Church is the biggest single Scout sponsor. It formed the first U.S. Council in 1913. Catholic churches are the fourth largest Scout sponsor. Together, Mormons and Catholics support more than one-fourth of all Boy Scout activities in America. Combining the sponsorship of non-Mormon Protestant denominations adds another 725,243 scouts to the total. Religious organizations sponsor more than half of just the Cub Scout packs, for younger boys, in the United States. There is no official religious affiliation, although scouts often meet in basements of sponsoring churches; the Boy Scout oath and law, which is taken seriously, affirms a belief in God. The highest percentage--21 percent--of boys who meet eligibility requirements, are located in the far western United States, as compared to 15 to 20 Percent in the other major regions of the country. This is probably owing to the influence and involvement of the Mormon church. Baden-Powell's movement caught on like wildfire throughout the developed world in the early decades of this century. Today, with the support of the World Scout Organization, scouting is having a resurgence similar to the early days of the movement, with new troops founded in former eastern bloc countries, which had outlawed scouting in the late 1940s. Education is important to the Boy Scouts. In the 1980s the national organization began an aggressive attack on what it identified as the "five unacceptables"- hunger, child abuse, drug abuse, illiteracy, and youth unemployment. The organization stresses educational achievement in each program of the project, besides food drives and the like. Boy's Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts, has joined with the Bank Street College of Education, and now publishes installments of great literary masterpieces in comic book form alongside familiar articles on trail lore. The Boy Scout Handbook, now in its tenth edition, expanded and largely rewritten, encourages reading and academic achievement and attempts to educate boys in many areas. For example, the section on biology discusses the oxygen-carbon cycle, photosynthesis, the water cycle, and North American animals. There are sections on meteorology, geography, and astronomy. To reflect the concerns of a new generation of scouts, along with instruction on the latest techniques of wilderness ecology, which has earned the Handbook praise from the U.S. Forest Service, there is also a section on "sexual responsibility," which warns about AIDS, and a twenty-four page pull-out section for parents, "How to Protect Your Children From Child Abuse and Drug Abuse." Lest admirers of earlier editions of the Handbook, such as Paul Fussell, worry that its non-literary blend of practical homiletics and homey good sense has been deconstructed, there are still the old sections on knot tying, first aid, and good citizenship. Education has always been the cornerstone of scouting. For instance, the scout motto Be Prepared has traditionally been explained in the Handbook as follows: "A Scout prepares for whatever comes his way by learning all he can." But leaders try to stress education as a general theme in most scouting activities these days. The Spring Camporee held in May 1990 by the Green River District, Chief Seattle Council, for example, set up their tents in a field adjoining the Boeing Aerospace and Electronics Center. They toured the center and learned something about space technology. For another example, there are fifty computer bulletin boards that form an informal intercouncil communications network throughout the world. One can download articles on a variety of subjects through the bulletin boards, including history, geography, and computers. As yet another example, on one rainy Sunday morning in March 1992, I observed several dozen soggy but enthusiastic Cub Scouts who participated in a rather complicated demonstration of American Indian techniques in which they drilled and tapped into maple trees and boiled the sap into syrup. And for one last example, the town of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, sponsors a troop of Police Explorers, which consists of young persons who are considering careers in law and law enforcement. They serve as volunteers with the local police department and are given what amounts to introductory apprenticeship training. Around the country, other Career Awareness Explorer posts offer young people chances to consider careers in medicine and computers. The consecutive stages of the Boy Scouts are established in reference to the grades in the educational system. Boys begin Tiger Scouts, a pre-Cub Scout program only recently added, in the first grade. Cub Scouts are in the second through the fifth grades; they join the Boy Scouts in the Sixth grade and may remain in the troop until the end of high school (grade twelve); or, they may choose in the ninth grade or, thereafter to join the Explorers, which runs from grade nine through the age of twenty-one, which is approximately the end of four years of college. While the organization often works through the public schools, scoring's purpose is primarily recreational, not educational. As one scout executive told me, "We sell it to the boys as fun. If we sold it as more school, nobody would come." Yet by showing the compatibility of what is academic with what is fun and practical in its activities, the organization indirectly upholds formal education. At the same time, scouting offers an informal educational agenda that the schools cannot offer. Two sociologists who studied this matter, Judith Kleinfeld and Anne Shinkwin, noted in Making Good Boys Better the following: Parents, and particularly middle-class parents, are arduous to see their children acquire the skills that they recognize are essential for success in American society--how to influence other people, how to work within organizational structures and roles, how to organize one's self and others to achieve goals, and so on. These skills, gained through scouting activities such as camp outs, troop meetings, and scout service projects, allow boys to affirm threatened family values, such as loyalty to one's primary group, community, and nation, because families--increasingly nowadays families with one parent--are involved. But a deeper education underlies the informal education in social skills learned in scouting, and one can still see it quietly unfold in scout troops throughout the nation. The Boy Scouts are responsible for forming in the boys so-called habits of the heart, a phrase recently borrowed from Tocqueville by Robert Bellah for his book of that title. Some "habits," such as devotion to religious tradition, to family life, and to the local community, form the uniquely American character, and with it the kind of citizen who feels he has a voice in the larger political debate of the nation. Indeed, Tocqueville saw that free institutions can be upheld by just such an individual, who feels no significant aspect of the relationship between the local and the wider community should bar his participation in both. The Boy Scouts' emphasis on religion provides obvious moral coherence and legitimacy to this deeper education. By locating these "habits" in the domain of the ultimate and sacred, what are really heavy new responsibilities may feel less burdensome to the child as he learns them. One day he may be more inclined to shoulder them willingly because he will perceive that they flow naturally from the immortal core of life. The Boy Scouts have long had their detractors. For instance, from the time of Baden-Powell, scouts have been accused of militaristic jingoism. The image is hard to shake. Boy Scouts are organized into units called patrols and troops; they wear uniforms, march, and salute. One recent biographer of Baden-Powell cites a hitherto unknown letter that he claims proves the explicit militaristic intentions that lay behind the founding of the organization. On a related issue, the same author censures Baden-Powell for not putting enough distance between the English scouts and the fascists. The theory that explicit connections existed between the Boy Scouts and the Balilla, Avanguardisti, the Hitlerjugend is old and by now wearing pretty thin, but it still finds its way into the debate. It has been argued with greater justification that Boy Scouts have been especially vulnerable throughout their history to Predation by pedophiles who become adult leaders. In 1988 the organization disclosed that it had recorded more than two hundred cases of sexual misconduct. The new handbook has a section that helps the individual scout to combat the problem using the "3 R's"": "Recognize, Resist and Report." One Boy Scout official told me that, since the late 1980s, the organization's unstated policy requires that if there is a report of abuse by a leader, the organization considers the individual guilty, until Proven innocent. Still, the perception may never go away. For one thing, scouting pedophilia has become a literary commonplace, as Paul Fussell, in The Boy Scout Handbook, acknowledges: Then there are the leers and giggles triggered by the very word 'scoutmaster,' which in knowing circles is alone sufficient to Promise comic pederastic narrative. 'All scoutmasters are homosexuals,' asserted George Orwell, who also insisted that 'All tobacconists are Fascists. And who can forget the portrait of the lubricious Greff, the scoutmaster in The Tin Drum by Giinter Grass. I would have been glad to gaze out at the meadow where, as I knew, scouts under the leadership of Greff the greengrocer were pitching tents, playing lansquenet, and, as befitted boy scouts, doing good deeds. Not that I was interested in their fulsome glorification of camp life. What appealed to me was the sight of Greff in his short pants. Such was his love of slender, wide-eyed, pale boys that he had donned the uniform of Baden-Powell, the father of the boy scouts. In the novel, Greff hangs himself in a Boy Scout-style ceremony after receiving a summons to appear on a morals charge. (Incidentally Giinter Grass does not confuse the Pfadfinderbewegung with Hitlerjugend; he despises both equally.) Grass's allusion to Baden-Powell in this context is also part of the tradition: since the late 1970s three separate biographies (Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, 1980; Michael Rosenthal's Character Factory, 1986; and Tim Jeal's The Boy Man, 1990) have either declared or implied, although they offer no conclusive proof, that Robert Baden-Powell was a homosexual, and that the founding of the Boy Scout movement must be understood as sublimation of sex and pedophilia. One wonders why the three biographies were needed. Two of them are quite long. They reveal little that is very interesting about the kind of man Baden-Powell was. His inner life appears not to have been very impressive. In my opinion, given the distorted predispositions of some successful modern biographers to search for sexual flaws, there is little to choose from between the three recent biographies of Baden-Powell and an earlier one (Baden-Powell: The Two Lives of a Hero, 1964, by William Hillcourt and Lady Baden-Powell) that unabashedly venerated him. The recent problems of the Boy Scouts of America derive from their attempt to stand-in a way that is consistent with their history-for a set of time-honored values that they actually claim to believe in and that they are reluctant to change. They feel these values are enshrined in the Boy Scout oath: On my honor I promise I will do my best: to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the scout law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. The Boy Scouts refuses to permit atheists, homosexuals, and girls to become members based on their interpretation of the oath, and they feel legally entitled to exclude them because they are a private organization. In the belief, in Tennyson's phrase, that the old order changeth, yielding place to the new, some now argue that the Boy Scouts have lost their claim to be entirely private for a number of reasons, and they feel that their exclusions violate the civil liberties of the individuals in question. More broadly, they find that the Boy Scouts historically have been guilty of perpetuating what they would term America's "theocentric, patriarchal/sexist, and homophobic culture," and that now is the time for this to be redressed. In the case of Curran v. Mount Diablo (California) Council of the Boy Scouts of America, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Tim Curran sued the Boy Scouts in 1981 for rejecting Curran after learning that the Eagle Scout and assistant scoutmaster was a homosexual. The ACLU and Curran lost; the case is currently being appealed before the California Supreme Court. In Randall v. Orange County (California) Council of the Boy Scouts of America, the ACLU and two nine-year-old twins are suing the Scouts because their membership application was rejected when they refused to say they believed in God. The Superior Court judge in the case agreed with the Plaintiffs that their civil rights had been violated and ordered them readmitted into the Cub Scouts. In a similar case in Illinois, Elliot Welsh sued the Boy Scouts for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he found himself unable to enroll his son Mark in the organization because of the Declaration of Religious Principle in the membership application, which reads: The Boy Scouts of America maintains that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God and therefore recognizes the religious element in the training of the member.... Welsh wanted the Declaration and oath changed to take the word God out. The suit was denied on March 13, 1992, but it is expected that on appeal it will make its way eventually to the Supreme Court of the United States. In Miami, a judge refused in June of 1991 to order a regional scout council to allow an eight year-old girl, Marge Mankes, to attend a summer scout camp that started the next day. The judge said the issue of whether girls should be admitted should be decided at a trial and not in an emergency hearing. The girl was kept on in her home troop after the regional council expelled her. That case has not yet gone to court. The ACLU is currently considering taking on a similar case in California being brought by a group of girls who want to join a local troop. On May 21, 1992, Mr. Keith Richardson, a homosexual, filed a complaint with Chicago's commission on human relations. He has not applied for a position with the Boy Scouts but claims that if he does he will be rejected because they discriminate against homosexuals. As the cases begin to move through the legal system, strong voices are audible on both sides. In an article for the National Review in June 1991, Midge Decter directed her sarcasm at the ACLU: "Naturally, it [the ACLU] would not stand idly by with so rich a target as the Boy Scouts of America." The ACLU attorney who lost the Curran trial complained, "If the Boy Scouts claimed to espouse anti-Semitism, would that excuse exclusion of all Jewish scoutmasters?" Lawyers for the Boy Scouts claim in each of these cases that to admit the excluded groups would alter the fundamental character of the organization and change its nature for the boys who go through it. Lawyers for the parties bringing these suits contend that this is exactly what they seek; they deem it ought to be changed. You do not have to be a lawyer or a legal scholar--and I am neither--to see that these cases, taken together, appear to bring us to a kind of classic late twentieth-century American legal confrontation. The rights--some would argue, the very existence--of an organization that many claim is a pillar of traditional American community and family ideals are here pitted against the highly politicized interests of aggrieved and therefore entitled excluded groups. What is at stake, on the one hand, is what constitutes the legal rights of organizations that call themselves private. The superior court judge who ruled in Curran v. Mount Diablo wrote: The Supreme Court has long recognized a right to "engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas." The converse, a right not to associate, or the right of the group to exclude unwanted members is also recognized... The court concludes...that forced inclusion of a Scout Leader who has...acknowledged...homosexuality ... would substantially impact the defendant's [the Boy Scouts'] ability to get across its preferred message in its preferred way. The issue, of course, is not whether the defendant's view is correct, or enlightened, or even best calculated to achieve the organization's broader goals. The issue is simply whether application of the Unruh [Civil Rights] Act here would substantially interfere with Mt. Diablo Council's ability to achieve its expressive goals. The court concludes that it would. But the deeper question hidden beneath the legal battles is who gets to define the essential character of communities. A community needs at some level to define itself to itself. One way it attempts to do so is through activities relating to its children that ensure that, in some way, the unique stamp of a locality or neighborhood will endure and stand out from the ubiquitous national culture. At present, however, the stakes are more mundane and immediate. The San Francisco School Board has voted not to permit the Boy Scouts to operate in the public schools because of what it deems discrimination. Other school boards are considering similar action. In various parts of the country parent-teacher organizations have quietly dropped their sponsorship of scout troops. More significant, local United Way chapters are doing the same. On February 20, 1992, the local United Way chapter of San Francisco, with the concurrence of the national organization, dropped its funding of six Bay Area scouting councils that serve nearly 100,000 youths when scout leaders voted unanimously to reject United Way's proposals to change scouting. Confronted with United Way's ultimatum, a scout leader declared, "Our values are not for sale." A few corporate donors, also from San Francisco, felt morally compelled to withdraw their sponsorship in the spring of 1992. Most notable was Levi Straus and Company, a large importer of cloth that manufactures casual clothing. Ironically, the company's advertising reflects unambiguously heterosexual themes to sell cowboy pants. On the other side of the battlefield, the Mormon and Catholic churches, who together provide more than one-fourth of the financial support for the Boy Scouts of America, threaten to withdraw their support if homosexuals are admitted. In the words of a spokesman for the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, such a change would be "anti-family, anti-everything." The various groups who hammer at the doors of the Boy Scouts desire a radical transformation of the group's values. One might agree that, after all, many local institutions in American life need a shaking up. The National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey reveals that most Americans in the 1980s supported changes often stamped as "liberal" by earlier generations. Social change seems to be something most Americans are increasingly easy about. Having smashed a few statues in our temple and not having been smitten in return, we now do it more readily, as part of general housekeeping. But research does not yet support the belief that Americans desire sweeping social change. Perhaps while we want to hear what expounders of radical positions have to say, we feel each case should be taken on its own merits, transforming in cases where it is called for, reforming in some, leaving well enough alone in others. If that is so, assuming we can find a standard, what standard should be applied in each case when the issue is changing an American institution so deeply bound up with American cultural traditions and values? Is there a common sense standard we might appeal to in each? If one looks at the case of Elliot Welsh, whose position is that his son should not have to swear an oath in which he professes a belief in God, Mr. Welsh has made some sensible arguments. He points out, for example, that the Declaration of Religious Principle in the application contradicts the Boy Scouts' claim in their literature that "any boy can join" and that the scouts are nonsectarian. He concludes that boys are required to be religious. If he is right, this may mean that teachers violate the First Amendment of the Constitution when they hand out Boy Scout literature during school hours. In his own words: BSA [Boy Scouts of America] is fighting for the right to have public school first-grade teachers invite all six-year-old boys in their classes to join Tiger Cubs-only to discriminate against some of them, solely on the basis of the religious beliefs of their parents, after they show enough interest to show up at a meeting. There are other arguments Welsh might have made. Whether the Boy Scouts claim to be a religious organization or an organization of religious boys, for example, they presumably desire to convert or at least to influence other nonreligious boys. They cannot do that by merely preaching to the choir, so to speak. They need to bring in other boys. Another example of a sensible argument is one made by girls for why they should be allowed to join. Sometimes there is no local Girl Scout chapter. Even when there is, the leaders may not go in for the open-air activities preferred by some girls in this more physically active era. Marge Mankes, the eight-year-old from Florida who wanted the emergency order to go to Cub Scout camp, says she tried the Girl Scouts but did not find it challenging. Since 1988, the Boy Scouts have had increasing difficulty in finding male volunteers and leaders, and so women have been allowed to be troop leaders. But these examples of common sense give way upon further reflection. Why would a strongly committed agnostic such as Welsh want his child around children who either believe, or worse, who will take the oath without believing in or understanding it? The argument is somewhat the same for the girls. Boys of scouting age, from roughly age six to eleven, prefer to associate with other boys, or so, at least, psychologists tell us. So are girls going to enter an organization in which they are shunned? Would it not be better for the activists to demand more of the local Girl Scout organization or to start one if one does not exist than to demand such a profound change of the Boy Scouts? It defies common sense to suppose that homosexuals and nonbelievers are not, were never, nor ever will be in the Boy Scouts, or that Boy Scout membership can prevent future homosexuality or agnosticism. But may we therefore conclude, merely from the past, present, or future presence of these orientations, that those are not permissible disqualifications for membership, especially when the organization claims the opposite orientation? The spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America made it clear that such orientations do matter to the organization when asked to comment on the Curran trial: Our position has always been that scouting represents tradition, or, if you will, family structure and values. It has always been our position that a person living in a homosexual life style does not exhibit a role model that is consistent with traditional or longtime views of scouting. We're not saying that scouting values are for every person in society to live by. If you don't share the values of scouting, perhaps there would be another organization better suited to your interests. One suspects the motives may be less than idealistic in a few of the cases. Rather than about sexual preference, life-style, or religious belief, some of these lawsuits are motivated by politics and money. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has close ties with some new radical groups, such as the Queer Scouts in Washington, DC., and the Forgotten Scouts in the Bay Area, whose primary purpose is to introduce homosexuality into the Boy Scouts. The legal crowbars being used by the ACLU to open the door of eligibility to the Boy Scouts are the public accommodation statutes, originally used to regulate hotels and other businesses. In recent litigation, civil libertarians have been arguing that the statutes apply to private clubs, such as the Jaycees. They claim such organizations are not private clubs but career enhancement groups. Even as the attempts by the various groups intensifies, one should keep this matter in perspective: the groups and individuals in question simply want to enter the Boy Scouts of America and desire that the organization change to accommodate them. So far they have sought to achieve their goals in a civilized way through legal channels. The German Boy Scouts, by contrast, were infiltrated by radicals, possibly East German Stasi agents, who tore the group apart from within in the 1970s. Except for the smallest and most remote, all cultures are formed out of many streams. Despite the uniform appearance of American culture to outsiders, the nation's local communities paint an intricate and enigmatic portrait of dynamic cultural life that is difficult to comprehend. Each community leads a life of its own and may be moved by many considerations, not all of them meeting standards of objective rationality or common sense. Communities exist in the real world and must take life as it comes, not up in the pure air of world transforming hypotheses. The view exists that the Boy Scouts are hidebound traditionalists, tightly controlled, and directed from a central organization that fights change all the way. The truth, at least at the level of local Boy Scout Councils and Troops, is that some troops may fit the picture, while others are diverse and changing. While some local groups may toe the line, a great deal of flexibility appears to be possible, with the exception of a few central points, such as the Declaration of Religious Belief. As in the case cited above where women are now troop leaders, it seems that when a particular change has already occurred, or consensus has been reached that a reform is needed across a large enough set of the local Boy Scout posts, a critical mass is reached. Then change is mandated at the national level, which is usually uniformly but sometimes variously interpreted and put into action at the local level. There are abundant examples of local variations and changes. Southern Boy Scouts have responded to criticism by no longer displaying the Confederate battle flag and other regalia in their ceremonies. Marge Mankes was expelled by the regional council but retained by her local troop after she failed to win the emergency court order allowing her to attend Cub Scout camp. In California, a scout troop outside of the Bay Area has resolved to admit homosexuals in defiance of the prohibition of their membership by the Boy Scouts of America. So far no action has been taken to revoke their charter. More than likely nothing will happen. Another example occurred in Chicago, where a troop of Explorer Scouts from the Cabrini Green housing project went on a camping trip to Michigan. They wore gang tattoos, smoked cigarettes along the trail, and listened to the rap group N.W.A. ("Niggers With Attitudes") on their radios. While the national organization frowns on smoking, hate music, and so forth, they welcome the participation of these boys. They feel that participation in scouting can perhaps turn them away from gangs and hatred. The list of changes in the Boy Scout national organization that appear to be responses to local needs is long. In 1969 young women were admitted into the Explorers and Alpha Phi Omega, the scouting service fraternity on college campuses. The newly revised Boy Scout Handbook has already been mentioned. Another program, introduced in 1991 by the national organization called "Learning for Life," is not the Boy Scouts but makes use of scouting techniques and regalia. It admits girls, homosexuals, atheists, and agnostics. It was developed for children between the ages of nine and eighteen, meets in public schools, and is led by four person teams, including the school principal, a teacher, and two other people from the school or community. Given the deterioration of the school and family, the decline of respect for authority and religion, and the increased pressures placed on children to pursue destructive pleasures, it has become difficult to be a child in America. Perhaps the Boy Scouts, with their diverse programs, their informal educational emphasis, and traditional values deserve to be left alone to change as their communities change. For the good of both the local and the wider community, or, as they would say, "For God and Country," the Boy Scouts at least lets children be children. [Taken from ALLEN SALZMAN. The Boy Scouts Under Siege. THE AMERICAN SCENE 1992, 61,4, autumn, 591-597. ALLEN SALZMAN teaches in the
humanities and social sciences departments at Triton Community College in River Grove, Illinois.] |
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