While I'm in shock over the Batman shootings (check out Garance Franke-Ruta's painfully accurate outline of how this will play out in public discourse), here are some further thoughts from around the web on the Boy Scouts' decision to keep out the homos:
- The must-read, of course, is our own Gabriel Arana's Merit Badge of Silence.
- Mitt Romney was against banning lesbians and gay men from the Boy Scouts before he was in favor of it. Check out the clip, at the beginning of Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC segment, of Romney promising Massachusetts voters that, as a Boy Scouts board member, he would work to end the ban.
- Eagle Scout Zach Wahls, raised by two moms, says that a "secret cabal" can't stop the change that's gonna come, and notes that the Minnesota Boy Scouts just stuck out their tongues and said "nyaah-nyaah, we're going to include gay folks in our Scouts." (Snarky language is all mine.)
- Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times compares the Boy Scouts' exclusion of gay folks to their once-upon-a-time exclusion of "Negroes":
The Scouts seem to be saying: If gays are around, we can't stop thinking about homosexuality. ...
As a former Scout, I have too much affection for the organization to take any pleasure in this latest embarrassment. "They're stuck in the Dark Ages," my mother said, over the telephone, and she's 76.
- Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out says that Zach Wahls is dreaming, given that the Latter-Day Saints Church sponsors one-third of all Boy Scout troops, and would simpy pull out of the organization if the policy shifted to openness. In other words, that light bulb has to want to change, and it emphatically does not.
And yet somehow the Girl Scouts get by without LDS money. Check out why here at this LDS forum:
