Forget the Boy Scouts and support Campfire USA. They have an all inclusive policy. Has anybody heard of any “sex-capades” in the Campfire organization?
It’s Margaret Thatcher style individualist conservatives who don’t even believe in community. The left by and large believes in community, and they want a social system and a government that recognizes the importance of community. The Good Doctor and I disagree here, I suspect — I think that the whole point of socialism is community. (Then again, I’m an anarchist socialist, not a centralizing socialist.)
I was in Boy Scouts until I got the boot for refusing to take an elective religious studies merit badge. Not required for Eagle Scout or anything. I was there from 5 to 14.-Also, I don’t see a difference between having a straight female or gay male member if you’re concerned about pedophiles (which are almost always straight men).
So do I assume that you encourage heterosexuals under the age of 18 to engage in sex? As you say, “How to discourage the behavior, but not the orientation?” No one is encouraging the orientation, anyway — acceptance is the word, not encouragement. Young people who are gay usually know about it, just as young people who are heterosexual know about it, long before they actually engage in the behavior. Well, they can hold hands and kiss.
Okay, the boy scouts don’t allow girls, so I guess by your standard there’s no encouragement of heterosexual activity there. What about a church groups with both boys and girls? What about the high school prom? If that isn’t encouraging heterosexuality, then I don’t know what is. Would you let your son take a girl to the dance, would you let your daughter go to the dance with a boy? I guess you’re encouraging sex then. How do you discourage the behavior, but not the orientation? I haven’t called you a bigot, don’t call me one.
My hunch is that gay teenagers have about as much sex as straight teenagers. Maybe less, for various reasons. I was a teenager in the 1960s, when kids weren’t supposed to have sex before marriage, and gosh there was a lot of fooling around. It’s naive to think kids aren’t going to have sex. Here in Ontario same-sex marriage is legal, so same-sex dating can lead to same-sex marriage just as straight dating can lead to straight marriage. (But not because somebody wasn’t careful and got pregnant.) If two kids meet in the boy scouts and fall in love, I think that’s great, and I wish them all the best.
My understanding is that the Boy Scouts are not legally obligated to accept gay boys. I’m not saying they should be forced to do so. I do believe that if they decide not to, they will be making a moral and political mistake. But that’s up to them.+There’s a more important issue raised by your last sentence. In general modern democracies are based on the idea that the rights of individuals should be respected, even if the majority don’t like it. (Of course how this works out in practice is complicated.) So that if the majority of the Boy Scouts were white (as is probably the case), they still could not vote to exclude boys of other “races”. The rights of the few would have to be protected, even against the desire of the many. A lot of people worked long and hard, with great personal sacrifice, to establish those rights.+We are now going through a major social change. More and more people believe the the rights of gay people should also be protected. I’m among those people. I don’t see anything wrong with “homosexual” acts, and I think people who are “homosexual” should have the same rights that “heterosexuals” do. (I put those words in quotes because I think the world of sexual behavior is more complicated than that simple binary opposition indicates.) That includes the right to marry. I have quite a few gay friends who are married, and I can tell you they are pleased as could be that they’ve been able to establish their loving relationships on the same basis as others. Other people, and I suspect you are among them, don’t think that gay people should have the same rights. I don’t understand why not.+Some people who post here seem to feel a kind of revulsion when they think about what it is that gay men, in particular, do with each other. (I could name some, but maybe that’s not necessary.) Well, too bad. They should just stop thinking about it, if it bothers them. There’s no harm to anyone, so they should just grow up. Anyway, heterosexual couples can do some of those same things.+Enough for now. More than enough, probably.
I’m not equating race and sexual orientation. But I do think that sexual orientation should not be the basis for civil discrimination. As I said, I don’t think the Boy Scouts should be forced by law to admit openly gay boys, but I do think they are behind the times. Change has been very fast in the last decade, and it’s going to continue.+As for marriage, I’ve never had strong feelings about it. I guess it’s okay for society and the government to regulate such things, but I don’t find it personally important. I think a contract system would probably work as well as well as marriage. I think whatever is in place, marriage or contract, should be limited to consenting adult human beings. Of course one can argue about what counts as adult — where I was born, 14 was considered okay, but I would prefer a slightly older age. As for plural marriage, in theory I have no trouble with three or four or more people sharing living and sexual arrangements, and I bet it happens more than we know about. In practice I worry that in the communities where it’s practiced, it is often to the detriment of young women.+I notice that your notes seem only to mention young men and older men, as if that were the only relevant same sex relationship. Is there any reason you don’t mention men of the same age, or women of the same age? How do you feel about young women and older women? Do you have the same strength of emotion when contemplating such relationships?+I’m sorry to hear that your gay male friends are dealing with HIV. But I don’t think that disease and morality are the same thing. I don’t think that the possibility of contracting syphilis or gonorrhea through heterosexual activity means that heterosexuality is wrong.
I’m sorry if you think I’m tearing anybody down. I’m just trying to have a discussion. I’m opposed to homophobia, in all of its forms, because I think it tears people down. I think the policy of the Boy Scouts is harmful, because it discriminates against gay kids. I think this policy tears people down.+And as for getting off topic, well, maybe, maybe not. I brought up same-sex marriage in the context of same-sex dating, which doesn’t seem so far off the topic to me. And you went along with that and raised the issue of how marriage is defined. Well, in Ontario, where I live, same-sex marriage is legal. That’s not my definition, that’s the position of the government.+I’ve said, and I will say again, that I don’t think the Boy Scouts should be forced by law to admit openly gay boys or to have openly gay scout leaders. That’s for them to decide. But I can still have my opinion about it.+Am I correct that the Girl Scouts are more open? Here’s what a statement from the Girl Scouts that I found on Wikipedia:
“As a private organization, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. respects the values and beliefs of each of its members and does not intrude into personal matters. Therefore, there are no membership policies on sexual preference. However, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. has firm standards relating to the appropriate conduct of adult volunteers and staff. The Girl Scout organization does not condone or permit sexual displays of any sort by its members during Girl Scout activities, nor does it permit the advocacy or promotion of a personal lifestyle or sexual preference. These are private matters for girls and their families to address.”+In the light of your earlier post (“Is it really mentally bigoted not to encourage young males under the age of 18 to engage in sodomy? How to discourage the behavior, but not the orientation….”), how do you feel about the this policy of the Girl Scouts? Would a policy like for the Boy Scouts relieve your concerns?
Now you want to talk about Mauritania….+If nature uses homosexuality to remove someone from the gene pool, it’s not doing a very good job. The new Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, is openly gay, and she has two children. Oooops, nature, you got that wrong.+Of course you have failed to read and therefore failed to understand what I wrote. You talk about my “demands to ‘force’ the Boy Scouts to comply [with] [my] opinion” — I have repeatedly said that I don’t want to force the Boy Scouts to change their policy. When you get that right, maybe we can talk.
@gresch and lonecatyou both have wandered from the point. A gay mom was a boy scout leader for her young son (who probably doesn’t know if he’s gay or straight, and probably straight). She was tossed and her son was told he wasn’t welcome there.i would think the boy scouts, if they were true to their creed, would want to help this boy.as for marriage rights, it’s simple, the government in many states gives MARRIED heterosexual couples SPECIAL RIGHTS.so the choice is to rescind those SPECIAL RIGHTS FOR MARRIED HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES, or grant them to others who want to live in the same commitmentthe country has gone for the latter. Personally i don’t think the government has any business granting special rights, or even regulating marriage. I’m surprised that the religious wingnuts don’t take the correct side of the argument and work to get the government OUT of marriage.if people had no special rights associated with marriage, and marriage didn’t happen in secular locations then i don’t think there’d be any issues at all.
@gresch>and that marriages performed under the authority of religion should have no force of law behind them.i will answer about your marriage rights question as it is something that affects me personally.this is not an exhaustive list, i will focus merely on a few that have had real instances in the worldfirst, marriage is federal. If you are heterosexual and married in one state, you have marriage rights in all other states. If you are same sex married, you only have marriage rights in the several states where “gay” marriage is legal. This means if you and/or your partner travel, that your marriage ‘rights’ are different in different states. the law of the land is that “separate and equal is neither separate nor equal”. So there is a fundamental problem there. Some say that civil unions can have a ‘package’ of contractual rights that equal marriage rights. because of ‘separate but equal’ that does not meet constitutional muster. Why should same sex couples have to do something different in order to procure the same rights.let’s define some ‘marriage’ rights. Health Proxy. Spouses of same sex couples have been denied their rights to visit and decide health care issues in states that do not recognize same sex marriage.Inheritance rights. Spouses of deceased partners, whom they have been with for decades, have been denied spousal rights with respect to inheritance and estate taxes.I could go on, but i think you have the idea. google will provide multiple examples of what i stated.
@greschi have an issue with two notions you mentioned.1. noone is saying the scouts should be forced by law to admit gay scouts or leaders, the scouts are considering this themselves. Indeed, I know many gay scout leaders (male and female, girl and boy scouts). They are honorable and committed people.2. I find your notion that a gay scout leader would teach “sodomy” offensive. It is a sad mistake and prejudice to believe that gay people are out to push homosexual sodomy on children, and more than it would be a sad mistake and prejudice to believe that heterosexuals would push intercourse on people.Homosexuals are not defined by the sex they have. In fact more straight people practice sodomy and anal sex than homosexuals do.
it’s interesting i read another religious wingnut article i read searching for this says it is the job of the boy scouts to protect their members from immoral ideas. apparently those ideas are that homosexuals exist. apparently it does not include the reality of being sexually moletsted by a straight scout leader.
so why is it ok for a ‘straight’ identified leaders to molest little boys, but a loving gay mother, identified as gay will somehow want to ‘teach these little boys to have sodomy’.
I don’t know why I bother. But here goes. First question: Who do you think is encouraging young males under the age of 18 to engage in sodomy? Second question, is it worse, in your opinion, for a young male under the age of 18 to engage in sodomy than for him to engage in missionary position sex with a girl his own age?
And to answer your question about Kathleen Wynne, the Premier of Ontario — she was married to a man and had children with him. Her children are her biological offspring. At some point she realized that she was gay, and she dissolved her marriage, and she is now in a relationship with another woman (I don’t believe they are married, but I could be wrong; I’m not personally acquainted with her).+I’ve seen this pattern more than a few times — sometimes, I think, people know that they are gay, but the social pressures of a previous time kept them from admitting — perhaps even to themselves — what they felt, so they entered into heterosexual marriages, and then at some point they realize that’s not working, and now that society is more open to gay relationships, they come out of the closet. I expect that as same-sex relationships become more acceptable, fewer people will have to hide their true selves.+I might note, further to this point, that I know a number of gay women who are having children through artificial insemination. I also know some who use natural insemination.+Which leads to my next point — a lot of people are more or less bisexual. How do they fit into your idea that nature is trying to remove people from the gene pool?
lonecat about 11 years ago
Because gay boys are not girls.
Bex Premium Member about 11 years ago
Forget the Boy Scouts and support Campfire USA. They have an all inclusive policy. Has anybody heard of any “sex-capades” in the Campfire organization?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/07/19/why-do-the-boy-scouts-exclude-gays/it-pays-to-be-inclusive
http://www.campfireusa.org/inclusionPolicy.aspx
DavidGBA about 11 years ago
Hate comes easy to that age if that is your leadership.
lonecat about 11 years ago
It’s Margaret Thatcher style individualist conservatives who don’t even believe in community. The left by and large believes in community, and they want a social system and a government that recognizes the importance of community. The Good Doctor and I disagree here, I suspect — I think that the whole point of socialism is community. (Then again, I’m an anarchist socialist, not a centralizing socialist.)
Stormrider2112 about 11 years ago
I was in Boy Scouts until I got the boot for refusing to take an elective religious studies merit badge. Not required for Eagle Scout or anything. I was there from 5 to 14.-Also, I don’t see a difference between having a straight female or gay male member if you’re concerned about pedophiles (which are almost always straight men).
lonecat about 11 years ago
So do I assume that you encourage heterosexuals under the age of 18 to engage in sex? As you say, “How to discourage the behavior, but not the orientation?” No one is encouraging the orientation, anyway — acceptance is the word, not encouragement. Young people who are gay usually know about it, just as young people who are heterosexual know about it, long before they actually engage in the behavior. Well, they can hold hands and kiss.
Dtroutma about 11 years ago
Whole thing’s been funny for a long time as the British founder of the whole “scout movement” was a “gay blade”.
cjr53 about 11 years ago
Why don’t they have separate drinking fountains too?
Because it is wrong to discriminate. It is wrong for some people to have rights denied to others.
lonecat about 11 years ago
Okay, the boy scouts don’t allow girls, so I guess by your standard there’s no encouragement of heterosexual activity there. What about a church groups with both boys and girls? What about the high school prom? If that isn’t encouraging heterosexuality, then I don’t know what is. Would you let your son take a girl to the dance, would you let your daughter go to the dance with a boy? I guess you’re encouraging sex then. How do you discourage the behavior, but not the orientation? I haven’t called you a bigot, don’t call me one.
lonecat about 11 years ago
My hunch is that gay teenagers have about as much sex as straight teenagers. Maybe less, for various reasons. I was a teenager in the 1960s, when kids weren’t supposed to have sex before marriage, and gosh there was a lot of fooling around. It’s naive to think kids aren’t going to have sex. Here in Ontario same-sex marriage is legal, so same-sex dating can lead to same-sex marriage just as straight dating can lead to straight marriage. (But not because somebody wasn’t careful and got pregnant.) If two kids meet in the boy scouts and fall in love, I think that’s great, and I wish them all the best.
lonecat about 11 years ago
My understanding is that the Boy Scouts are not legally obligated to accept gay boys. I’m not saying they should be forced to do so. I do believe that if they decide not to, they will be making a moral and political mistake. But that’s up to them.+There’s a more important issue raised by your last sentence. In general modern democracies are based on the idea that the rights of individuals should be respected, even if the majority don’t like it. (Of course how this works out in practice is complicated.) So that if the majority of the Boy Scouts were white (as is probably the case), they still could not vote to exclude boys of other “races”. The rights of the few would have to be protected, even against the desire of the many. A lot of people worked long and hard, with great personal sacrifice, to establish those rights.+We are now going through a major social change. More and more people believe the the rights of gay people should also be protected. I’m among those people. I don’t see anything wrong with “homosexual” acts, and I think people who are “homosexual” should have the same rights that “heterosexuals” do. (I put those words in quotes because I think the world of sexual behavior is more complicated than that simple binary opposition indicates.) That includes the right to marry. I have quite a few gay friends who are married, and I can tell you they are pleased as could be that they’ve been able to establish their loving relationships on the same basis as others. Other people, and I suspect you are among them, don’t think that gay people should have the same rights. I don’t understand why not.+Some people who post here seem to feel a kind of revulsion when they think about what it is that gay men, in particular, do with each other. (I could name some, but maybe that’s not necessary.) Well, too bad. They should just stop thinking about it, if it bothers them. There’s no harm to anyone, so they should just grow up. Anyway, heterosexual couples can do some of those same things.+Enough for now. More than enough, probably.
lonecat about 11 years ago
A mensch.
lonecat about 11 years ago
Freud has an interesting article on men who fall in love with unattainable women.
lonecat about 11 years ago
I’m not equating race and sexual orientation. But I do think that sexual orientation should not be the basis for civil discrimination. As I said, I don’t think the Boy Scouts should be forced by law to admit openly gay boys, but I do think they are behind the times. Change has been very fast in the last decade, and it’s going to continue.+As for marriage, I’ve never had strong feelings about it. I guess it’s okay for society and the government to regulate such things, but I don’t find it personally important. I think a contract system would probably work as well as well as marriage. I think whatever is in place, marriage or contract, should be limited to consenting adult human beings. Of course one can argue about what counts as adult — where I was born, 14 was considered okay, but I would prefer a slightly older age. As for plural marriage, in theory I have no trouble with three or four or more people sharing living and sexual arrangements, and I bet it happens more than we know about. In practice I worry that in the communities where it’s practiced, it is often to the detriment of young women.+I notice that your notes seem only to mention young men and older men, as if that were the only relevant same sex relationship. Is there any reason you don’t mention men of the same age, or women of the same age? How do you feel about young women and older women? Do you have the same strength of emotion when contemplating such relationships?+I’m sorry to hear that your gay male friends are dealing with HIV. But I don’t think that disease and morality are the same thing. I don’t think that the possibility of contracting syphilis or gonorrhea through heterosexual activity means that heterosexuality is wrong.
lonecat about 11 years ago
I’m sorry if you think I’m tearing anybody down. I’m just trying to have a discussion. I’m opposed to homophobia, in all of its forms, because I think it tears people down. I think the policy of the Boy Scouts is harmful, because it discriminates against gay kids. I think this policy tears people down.+And as for getting off topic, well, maybe, maybe not. I brought up same-sex marriage in the context of same-sex dating, which doesn’t seem so far off the topic to me. And you went along with that and raised the issue of how marriage is defined. Well, in Ontario, where I live, same-sex marriage is legal. That’s not my definition, that’s the position of the government.+I’ve said, and I will say again, that I don’t think the Boy Scouts should be forced by law to admit openly gay boys or to have openly gay scout leaders. That’s for them to decide. But I can still have my opinion about it.+Am I correct that the Girl Scouts are more open? Here’s what a statement from the Girl Scouts that I found on Wikipedia:
“As a private organization, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. respects the values and beliefs of each of its members and does not intrude into personal matters. Therefore, there are no membership policies on sexual preference. However, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. has firm standards relating to the appropriate conduct of adult volunteers and staff. The Girl Scout organization does not condone or permit sexual displays of any sort by its members during Girl Scout activities, nor does it permit the advocacy or promotion of a personal lifestyle or sexual preference. These are private matters for girls and their families to address.”+In the light of your earlier post (“Is it really mentally bigoted not to encourage young males under the age of 18 to engage in sodomy? How to discourage the behavior, but not the orientation….”), how do you feel about the this policy of the Girl Scouts? Would a policy like for the Boy Scouts relieve your concerns?
lonecat about 11 years ago
Now you want to talk about Mauritania….+If nature uses homosexuality to remove someone from the gene pool, it’s not doing a very good job. The new Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, is openly gay, and she has two children. Oooops, nature, you got that wrong.+Of course you have failed to read and therefore failed to understand what I wrote. You talk about my “demands to ‘force’ the Boy Scouts to comply [with] [my] opinion” — I have repeatedly said that I don’t want to force the Boy Scouts to change their policy. When you get that right, maybe we can talk.
dannysixpack about 11 years ago
@gresch and lonecatyou both have wandered from the point. A gay mom was a boy scout leader for her young son (who probably doesn’t know if he’s gay or straight, and probably straight). She was tossed and her son was told he wasn’t welcome there.i would think the boy scouts, if they were true to their creed, would want to help this boy.as for marriage rights, it’s simple, the government in many states gives MARRIED heterosexual couples SPECIAL RIGHTS.so the choice is to rescind those SPECIAL RIGHTS FOR MARRIED HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES, or grant them to others who want to live in the same commitmentthe country has gone for the latter. Personally i don’t think the government has any business granting special rights, or even regulating marriage. I’m surprised that the religious wingnuts don’t take the correct side of the argument and work to get the government OUT of marriage.if people had no special rights associated with marriage, and marriage didn’t happen in secular locations then i don’t think there’d be any issues at all.
lonecat about 11 years ago
Now you have to educate me — what’s an “Emo”?
dannysixpack about 11 years ago
@gresch>and that marriages performed under the authority of religion should have no force of law behind them.i will answer about your marriage rights question as it is something that affects me personally.this is not an exhaustive list, i will focus merely on a few that have had real instances in the worldfirst, marriage is federal. If you are heterosexual and married in one state, you have marriage rights in all other states. If you are same sex married, you only have marriage rights in the several states where “gay” marriage is legal. This means if you and/or your partner travel, that your marriage ‘rights’ are different in different states. the law of the land is that “separate and equal is neither separate nor equal”. So there is a fundamental problem there. Some say that civil unions can have a ‘package’ of contractual rights that equal marriage rights. because of ‘separate but equal’ that does not meet constitutional muster. Why should same sex couples have to do something different in order to procure the same rights.let’s define some ‘marriage’ rights. Health Proxy. Spouses of same sex couples have been denied their rights to visit and decide health care issues in states that do not recognize same sex marriage.Inheritance rights. Spouses of deceased partners, whom they have been with for decades, have been denied spousal rights with respect to inheritance and estate taxes.I could go on, but i think you have the idea. google will provide multiple examples of what i stated.
dannysixpack about 11 years ago
@greschi have an issue with two notions you mentioned.1. noone is saying the scouts should be forced by law to admit gay scouts or leaders, the scouts are considering this themselves. Indeed, I know many gay scout leaders (male and female, girl and boy scouts). They are honorable and committed people.2. I find your notion that a gay scout leader would teach “sodomy” offensive. It is a sad mistake and prejudice to believe that gay people are out to push homosexual sodomy on children, and more than it would be a sad mistake and prejudice to believe that heterosexuals would push intercourse on people.Homosexuals are not defined by the sex they have. In fact more straight people practice sodomy and anal sex than homosexuals do.
dannysixpack about 11 years ago
@lonecat
http://www.change.org/petitions/boy-scouts-of-america-reinstate-cub-scout-leader-who-was-removed-for-being-gay
http://www.dallasvoice.com/gay-scouts-leaders-deliver-petitions-bsa-headquarters-10138430.html
it’s interesting i read another religious wingnut article i read searching for this says it is the job of the boy scouts to protect their members from immoral ideas. apparently those ideas are that homosexuals exist. apparently it does not include the reality of being sexually moletsted by a straight scout leader.
so why is it ok for a ‘straight’ identified leaders to molest little boys, but a loving gay mother, identified as gay will somehow want to ‘teach these little boys to have sodomy’.
lonecat about 11 years ago
Oh. Okay. Well, no worse that what I did when I was that age.
lonecat about 11 years ago
I don’t know why I bother. But here goes. First question: Who do you think is encouraging young males under the age of 18 to engage in sodomy? Second question, is it worse, in your opinion, for a young male under the age of 18 to engage in sodomy than for him to engage in missionary position sex with a girl his own age?
lonecat about 11 years ago
And to answer your question about Kathleen Wynne, the Premier of Ontario — she was married to a man and had children with him. Her children are her biological offspring. At some point she realized that she was gay, and she dissolved her marriage, and she is now in a relationship with another woman (I don’t believe they are married, but I could be wrong; I’m not personally acquainted with her).+I’ve seen this pattern more than a few times — sometimes, I think, people know that they are gay, but the social pressures of a previous time kept them from admitting — perhaps even to themselves — what they felt, so they entered into heterosexual marriages, and then at some point they realize that’s not working, and now that society is more open to gay relationships, they come out of the closet. I expect that as same-sex relationships become more acceptable, fewer people will have to hide their true selves.+I might note, further to this point, that I know a number of gay women who are having children through artificial insemination. I also know some who use natural insemination.+Which leads to my next point — a lot of people are more or less bisexual. How do they fit into your idea that nature is trying to remove people from the gene pool?