Boy Scouts a Pedophile Org. Refuses Gays, Again!

Let me just say that I do believe and there is enough evidence on the cases of pedophilia coming out of the Boy Scouts than any other young men’s or children’s org. adamfoxie*blog takes responsibility for the tittle and everything posted here. Having said that I will post an article by

• • Nancy Goldstein at the
  • guardian.co.uk, 

Safeguarding the nation: the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Philadelphia, where, after a two-year review, the organisation this week reaffirmed its policy of excluding gays. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Congratulations to the Boy Scouts of America for emphatically reaffirming their policy banning gays earlier this week – despite historical evidence that this strategy for preventing child sexual abuse will earn them the same success rate as Penn State football and the Roman Catholic Church.

This is a point of fact, not mere conjecture. Because the Scouts are already, despite their very best efforts at concealment, on the record as having had similar difficulties as those other allegedly gay-free institutions with sexual abusers among the men it has entrusted with its youth. And for similar reasons. Not because the molesters were "gay" – in fact, LGBT people make up a fraction of child abusers and the sexual preferences of the sick, primarily male adults who molest children skew towards age rather than gender – but because the organization's leaders refused to discipline the child abusers in its midst or to involve the police, long past the time when they knew of instances of sexual abuse.

In fact, the smoking gun in the most recent of the many cases filed against the Scouts by former members for failing to protect them from predatory leaders was the Scouts' own "perversion files". These privately kept documents, over 20,000 pages of them, detail accusations and investigations of sexual abuse and other improprieties by 1,200 Boy Scout leaders across the United States from 1965 to 1985 – as well as what the organization did and did not do to protect their youth once cases of abuse were known to them. The files were never meant to see the light of day, and the Scouts fought hard, and unsuccessfully, to prevent them from being released after the trial, which resulted in an $18.5m punitive judgment against the Boy Scouts of America, the largest finding ever against the Scouts in a sex case jury trial.

An impressive piece of investigative reporting by the Oregonian during the trial documents numerous incidents where Scout officials allowed known abuse to continue. They ignored reports about William E Tobiassen, a longtime Scout leader with sons of his own, for more than two years. The abuse was only exposed "when the teenagers told a counselor and then police what had happened. Even then, internal memos show, the Scouts executive overseeing Tobiassen didn't want to ban him from scouting until there were formal charges."

Oregon has no law mandating Scouts to report their suspicions to authorities (in contrast to teachers, doctors and others), and national headquarters was quick to advise the Oregon Scouts of their legal right to keep that information confidential. Not coincidentally, secret files obtained by the Oregonian during its investigation show no record of Scout leaders alerting authorities to adults suspected of sexually abusing youth in at least 11 other instances.

There are remarkable similarities between the Boy Scouts' and the Roman Catholic church's handling of the sexual abusers in their midst. Both institutions documented numerous instances of abuse, failed either to discipline the adults involved or alert the authorities, and then decided, as the church did in 2002, at the height of its own sexual abuse scandal, that gays were the problem.

Which brings us closer to the heart of the matter. Ignore all of the Scouts' official mumbo-jumbo about the (unidentified) leaders who comprised the special committee of top Scout leaders that made this decision, especially the part about their alleged "diversity of perspectives and opinions". As the LA Times notes, what's really happening here is a business decision about the organization's sustainability, driven by the influence of two of the Scouts' most powerful benefactors: the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches. About 400,000 of the 2.7 million members left in the dwindling organization, "belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", which "encourages members to become involved in the Boy Scouts, and has its own section on the Boy Scouts of America webpage.

Counter-balancing the homophobia and financial clout of the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches are the gay-friendly policies and financial clout of board members like Ernst & Young and AT&T, both of whichhave expressed their reservations with the Scouts' ongoing anti-gay policies. As in all politics, when the importance of continuing to receive such sponsors' money outweighs the churches' clout, the Scouts' policy will change. Good luck with that, boys.

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