RobertNashville

Gay boys wouldn't have needed to "want in" if they hadn't been excluded in the first place - BSA's policy of excluding them is the first thing I find disgusting.   Why did the BSA, decades after it formed, create a policy to deny these boys from their ranks when they didn't have such a policy beore? Why should the BSA care if a boy is gay or straight?  What possible impact does that have on teaching boys what scouting has to teach them?   Yes, the fact that the BSA caved is disgusting but no more so than having the ridiculous policy in the first place.

Pretty soon we are ALL going to be living in a major welfare city; I'm about ready to quit my job and go on the dole myself.  :(

I guess I am missing your point; I guess I see this as a chicken or egg problem.   The BSA is at least a much to blame for their situation when the saw fit to specifically disallow homosexuals form scouting; that change was almost certainly brought about by one, dare I say radical special interest group putting pressure on them to adopt the policy.   Now they change their policy obsessively because of from a different radical special interest group.   I find both special interest group's tactics equally disgusting and the BSA's response to both also disgusting.

How about you just try "accepting"...not as "normal"; just accepting???   I don't consider homosexuals "normal"...as a way to live life I don't find it healthy or appropriate.  At the same time, they have an absolute right to live their lives as they see fit so long as they allow me to do the same.

Especially when getting an ambulance on the Dragon is usually quite a wait.   I can just imaging this guy was telling his wife/gf/rider what a good rider he was, too.

I predict George Zimmerman will be found not guilty.   Trayvon's parents, Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson and similar hangers-on will blame it all on race that the "white hispanic" was able to kill a sweet little black kid and then all those on welfare and food stamps (and a lot of free time) in LA, and Chicago and NYC and New Orleans and major cities in FL will take to the streets and burn down their own neighborhoods to show their support for Trayvon.   More militant "black leaders" will call for all out war on "whitey" (from the comfort of the gated communities they live in of course).   Obama will want to have a beer summit with Travyon's parents.   AG Holder (or his replacement if he's been indited or removed from office before the verdict) will seek to charge Zimmerman with violating Trayvon's "civil rights".   Five years from now it might all be over.

I just heart this morning that all (or at least most) of the stuff the defense wanted to introduce at trial about "little Trayvon" has been disallowed.   I guess the jury will only get to see the sanitized sweet, innocent, little 12 year old.   What do you want to bet, however, that every negative thing Zimmerman ever did will be "in"???

Especially if you go and get yourself shot first; that's when Mommy and Daddy have to make a 17 year old thug look like a cute, innocent little 12 year old. ;)

Whether you use the word "gay" or "homosexual" is immaterial; the words both signify the same thing today - if you want to argue about whether they should have become synonymous you won't get an argument from me but the that battle was lost at least a couple of decades ago. I don't agree that "gay" or "homosexual" implies "sex" any more than "heterosexual" implies "sex"; they identify (not imply) what sex a person finds sexually attractive/desirable.  Homosexuals find people of the same sex attractive to them; heterosexuals find people of the opposite sex attractive. In both cases, "heterosexual" or "homosexual" does not equal sex or the sex act.   The only reason the BSA has to identify one now is because the chose to do that a while ago...they should have never ventured down that road in the first place but they decided to do so anyway when they decided to preclude homosexual boys from scouting.

You know...if you are living your life in such a way that your family feels it needs to take your social networking accounts down to protect your reputation; it's probably a good indicator that you really need to reevaluate how you are living your life.

Frankly, I don't think "intellect" gets used very much (sorry if that offends anyone) when it comes to homosexuals.   How does allowing "gay" boys into scouting (remembering that the prohibition against gay boys is fairly recent) encourage "gay sex"? If allowing homosexual boys in scouting is equivalent to condoning gay sex does allowing heterosexual boys in scouting condone heterosexual sex?   If anyone in scouts is engaging in sex then they need to be disciplined; not because it might be "gay sex" but because it's SEX 

There is a lot of stuff discussed in this section that isn't necessarily "firearm related".   Besides, the Boy Scouts are a paramilitary group (I learned that from Red Dawn [original]) and we all know paramilitary groups use arms. :)

Ask the Boy Scouts why "one's sexuality" is so important - it's the BSA's formal policy against "gays" that put them in this position in the first place; a policy that was apparently set much more recently than I knew or suspected; a policy they set apparently because they bowed under pressure to have it. I'd be nothing but supportive of the BSA if they had always had this policy and was being consistent and standing their ground, I wouldn't necessarily agree with the policy but I'd support their right to have it.  Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case...their "core values" seem to be somewhat flexible.

Of course it will happen...gays have special mind control powers to exert control over "straights" and turn them "gay".  Plus we all know that gays can't keep it in their pants and just have sex at the drop of a hat. :)  ROTFLMAO

I was in Cub Scouts from the time I was old enough to join all the way through Boy Scouts and high school...there wasn't any "promiscuity" in my pack or my troop...was sexual promiscuity a common occurrence in scouting experience?   Yes...it's sad that the BSA succumbed to pressure which seems to be exactly how the formal policy excluding gay scouts came about in the first place...now they've succumbed to pressure to remove the policy...I'd say that's just as it should be since such a policy was never appropriate to have in the first place.

Maybe there is something I'm missing but I don't understand why there needs to be a "Travon" fund either???   Obviously, sweet little Travon doesn't need anything...his family doesn't need anything (it's not like he was a breadwinner of the family)...no legal expenses to pay for???   I'd be willing to bet that what this "fund" is just an excuse to line the pockets of "little Travon's" family.

I am a bit surprised and disappointed by some of the responses in this thread.  I would have thought, incorrectly it seems, that people on this board who claim they embrace the concepts of liberty and freedom and the rights we have as human beings would be a little less narrow minded than some seem to be.   I find homosexual sex repugnant; I don't find homosexuals repugnant...as long as a person of whatever sexual preference treats me fairly and with respect they will get the same from me; what they do behind closed doors/in their bedroom is, frankly, none of my damn business.  If a person is an asshole then the person is an asshole but that's not a function of their sexuality; they're just assholes. Period.   As long as a boy isn't disruptive/follows the rules and is in scouts to enjoy scouting then his sexual proclivities are absolutely irrelevant and it was wrong of the BSA to have ever made his sexual proclivities an issue in the first place.

Maybe it's just his way of telling me I'm full of :bs:

Oh god....you went and ruined a perfectly good discussion bringing that woman's (and I use the term "woman" very loosely here) into it. ;)

You make a good point. However, I don't know that I agree that stockpiling ammo necessarily requires a lot of disposable income. Of course, those with more income to spare can stockpile more easily and more quickly than someone who doesn't have as much but whether you can buy ammo by the pallet or by the case or 20 rounds every month, you can still do it. As with most things in life, it's about priorities. For the vast majority even of assumed "rich" people; there is never enough to do everything at once. ;)   It is the lack of evidence that is the rub for me...I can certainly look at the facts we have and agree that some people are trying to profiteer from the current situation but I just don't see that it's Wallyworld or Armslist scalpers who are anything close to the primary reason(s) for the difficulty of obtaining/price of some ammo.

If the BSA adopted its policy of not allowing gay boys to be part of scouts out of pressure from political forces (such as certain church or church related organizations) or some pressure group, is that in some way superior to then changing its policy because of pressure from groups with an opposing viewpoint or, does it all point to the same lack of backbone?   In the larger sense, while I don't think the policy against gays was appropriate; I believe the BSA, as a private organization had to right to set whatever rules it wants to set. That said, as you seemed to ask the question earlier, I do see that BAS as bearing a lot of the responsibility for this issue.

Volunteer organizations can't override state or federal law; neither can an employer.  My employer can fire me for violation of policy or because they don't like the car I drive; that's the only power they have.  Why should I give a rat's ass if NW organization doesn't like that I'm armed- they have ZERO power to compel me to do or not do anything.

This is from one website I found that, I cannot attest to its accuracy but even while written with a decided slant it seems to present a fairly accurate picture of when the policy of excluding gay boys was established; a policy I submit should never have existed at all and which I'm glad to see changed.     A Brief History of the Boy Scouts of America (how we got where we are today) The Boy Scouts of America was first incorporated in 1910, and in its early years tried to pitch as wide a tent as possible. To some extent, this inclusiveness stemmed from the need to expand its membership base in order to win exclusive rights to the Boy Scouts name (the Hearst newspaper chain was planning a rival organization at the same time). But financial imperatives dovetailed nicely with ideological ones: The BSA's founders were concerned by a perceived crisis of youth caused in part by a burgeoning immigrant population, urban poverty, and the broader moral perils of modernity. One BSA elder complained that the nation was suffering from "City rot" and described American adolescents as "a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky nerves and a doubtful vitality." Scouting would train these youths - in the words of the national charter granted to the BSA by Congress in 1916 - in the "patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred virtues" necessary for an enlightened citizenry. To become a truly national institution - as well as one dedicated to a nationalistic ideal - the BSA appreciated that it needed a representative membership.   In that vein, the organization emphasized uniformity, middle-class values, and diversified outreach. Foreign-language troops were discouraged; a Committee on Americanization edited theScout Law to remove references to class conflict inherited from its British antecedent; and in 1919 the BSA's Fifth Avenue office hired a field director to establish troops in the under-represented South and West. And though in the 1920s the BSA leadership tilted rightward (in 1919 the BSA's executive secretary suggested that scout-training might prevent Bolshevism), headquarters forbade any explicit political involvement and settled for an aggressive, ethnically neutral American chauvinism.   If today the BSA seems mired in a controversy over religious principle, in its earlier years the organization avoided any such denominational strife. Scouting in France, where Catholics, Protestants, and secularists had split into their own programs, was a sound warning of the alternative. And so, though the BSA was initially linked closely to the Protestant YMCA, it espoused a strict ecumenism based on a vaguely articulated but potent American deism. The BSA's commitment to religious pluralism was clearly spelled out in its 1917 "Declaration of Religious Principle": "The Boy Scouts of America maintains that no boy can grow into the best kind of citizenship without recognizing his obligation to God.... The Boy Scouts of America, therefore, recognizes the religious element in the training of a boy, but it is absolutely non-sectarian in its attitude toward that training."   In fact, at first the BSA's efforts to transcend religious and ethnic particularism scared off some conservative denominations, such as Lutherans, Catholics, and Mormons, according David Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners. But assimilationist pressures soon won these groups over, and by 1921 Catholics boasted the third-most troops of any denomination. For the Mormons, participation in the Boy Scouts became a way to convince suspicious mainline denominations of their Americanism. (By 1913 Scouting had become the official youth program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) The BSA, writes Macleod, favored a "'civil religion' - not as a prophetic faith, standing in judgment upon actual American practices, but as a celebration of the American way of life." With its good works on the home front during both world wars (during World War I, Scouts sold more than $350 million in war bonds and distributed some 20 million government flyers), the Boy Scouts became one of the chief symbols of American patriotism; by 1955 the group could claim nearly 4.2 million members. And if the nation's living rooms had continued to look like those on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, membership probably would have climbed steadily and with little contest.   That was not to be. The Boy Scouts as we currently know it, as an actively conservative body, emerged from the 1960s, a decade that challenged its institutional essence, its code of discipline, proud conformity, and devotion to country. Suddenly, it was no longer 'hip' to wear the khaki uniform. In desperation, the Cub Scouts removed the pledge "To be Square" from its Promise, while the Boy Scouts wondered aloud, in the words of a 1968 survey it commissioned, "Is Scouting In Tune with the Times?" Concerned that the answer might be "no," in 1972 the BSA revised its official Handbook. Sections on canoeing and rope-lashing were replaced with passages on urban hiking, drug abuse, and public speaking, and the organization made a concerted effort to recruit more minorities. But these efforts at relevance did little to correct stagnating membership, which declined for the first time in 1969 and plummeted in the early '70s; the Boy Scouts lost nearly one-third of its participants between 1973 and 1980. So the national leadership reverted to the old formula, issuing another Handbook revision in 1979 that returned the emphasis to camping skills and outdoor activities.   But as the organization rededicated itself to whittling and knot-tying, it also began to orient itself in the contemporary political landscape and to assert itself as a combatant in the culture war. Previously, the Boy Scouts had maintained a decorous silence about sexuality; according to the 1972 Scoutmaster's Handbook, Scoutmasters should "not undertake to instruct Scouts, in any formalized manner, in the subject of sex and family life.... t is not construed to be Scouting's proper area." Some of this was the residual prudishness of the organization's Edwardian founders. But the Boy Scouts also did not want to isolate the more conservative religious denominations that sponsored troops, who (ironically, given their current insistence that the BSA explicitly endorse certain sexual norms) worried that any official BSA position on sexuality would impinge on their own efforts at moral education. So, as with religion and politics, except for a few perfunctory references, the BSA was happy to leave the topic of sex to a boy's parents or clergyman.   To be sure, this official silence frequently cloaked unofficial discrimination. As the BSA pointed out almost giddily in its Supreme Court brief, until 1979 homosexual sodomy was a criminal offense in New Jersey, the state whose 1991 antidiscrimination laws formed the basis for gay Assistant Scoutmaster James Dale's Supreme Court challenge. Moreover, since its founding, the BSA was plagued by fears that scout leaders might molest their young charges, and avowed homosexuals were considered the most likely to do so. As James Tarr, the chief scout executive in the late '70s, recently recounted to Rolling Stone, "If you had a person you knew was a homosexual, you would confront them, and they would resign quietly."   But precisely because such homophobia was informal, other troops were free to interpret the Scouts' principles as consistent with a progressive world-view. Looking back on his days as a scout in New Jersey in the '40s and as a professional district executive for the BSA in Long Island in the '50s, David Napp, a retired Connecticut book salesman, acknowledges that some of his co-workers were probably gay. But "the issue never really came up in all the years I was in scouting as a boy or as a leader." In 1993, after the Boy Scouts discovered that Napp himself was homosexual - he claims he was not yet publicly out of the closet - he was dismissed from the organization. Napp now views his early years in scouting nostalgically: "[E]ven in the '30s, [the BSA] was really open to all boys.... We had boys who were fat, boys who were clods, boys who were nerds, we had black kids." Mike Montalvo, a scout in the late '60s in Dallas, concurs, recalling that in his troop it was generally known that one of his Scoutmasters' sons, also in the troop, was gay. "It was something that was known, but it wasn't talked about."   But amid the cultural conflict of the '70s, such silence became untenable. The gay rights movement began to demand a response to the discrimination that the Boy Scouts tacitly allowed, and several high-profile cases of child abuse by scout leaders inflamed the national leadership's homophobia. (Especially devastating was the 1977 trial of a group of New Orleans scout leaders who formed a troop to serve as a pedophiliac sex ring.) And so, in 1978, the national organization offered its first official, if barely publicized, disavowal of homosexuality: The president and chief Scout executive notified the organization's executive committee that the BSA does "not believe that homosexuality and leadership in Scouting are appropriate." The following year, for the first time, the BSA insinuated sexual politics into the 1979 Handbook. Whereas the Handbook had previously associated "morally straight" (a phrase from the Scout Oath) with respect for others, it now invoked heterosexuality: "When you live up to the trust of fatherhood your sex life will fit into God's wonderful plan of creation."   That same year brought another symbolic affirmation of this realignment: After a quarter-century in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the BSA moved its headquarters to Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Ostensibly, the BSA moved for lower rents and the convenient location near a major airport, but many saw it as part of a larger demographic and cultural redefinition. During the group's membership skid in the '70s - which was most pronounced in the Northeast - enrollment remained steady only in the Rocky Mountain region, where numbers were buoyed by the steady participation of 250,000 Mormons, whose percentage in the organization quadrupled from 1920 to 1980, to nearly 20 percent.   It was as if the BSA had decided that the terrain it had previously staked out - that broad national consensus - was suddenly uninhabitable and chose to decamp to the narrower territory of the traditionalists instead. So, even in 1986, when the Boy Scouts, citing a study of convicted child molesters, admitted that avowed homosexuals were no more dangerous than heterosexuals, they still rejected gays, pointing to the threat they posed to the traditional family. By 1991 the BSA had retreated so far from its big-tent roots that, when a California appellate court struck down the complaint of a gay Berkeley Eagle Scout who was rejected as a Scoutmaster, Scouting officials could explain, "We are a private organization aimed at traditional families." A few months later, the BSA's national spokesman elaborated: "We're not saying that Scouting values are for every person in society to live by." That same year those traditional values were further clarified when, with a bit of exegetical legerdemain, the BSA declared that homosexuality not only conflicted with the Scout Oath's injunction to be "morally straight" but also with the ideal of "cleanliness" featured in the Scout Law.   These explicit policies have made the Boy Scouts a safe haven for the conservative, centralized denominations that were once wary of it. The Church of Latter-day Saints now sponsors more troops than any other single institution. In fact, religious bodies now sponsor 65 percent of all troops, compared with just over 40 percent 15 years ago. And, according to some observers of the BSA's bureaucracy, the real clout within the organization now lies not with the national executive board, made up mostly of corporate executives, but with the relationships committee, which comprises representatives from all the major sponsoring institutions and which is dominated by religious groups. As Chuck Wolfe, a former member of the national executive board, told The Advocate magazine last year, "The real driving force is the relationships committee.... That's where the money comes from."   And, indeed, a significant part of that money comes from the Mormons. This grants the Church of Latter-day Saints substantial leverage with the national leadership. As one scout leader told Newsweek this year, "There is an unadulterated fear that [the Mormons are] going to bail out, that they're going to start their own program." The Mormons have invoked their power in the current controversy, threatening to withdraw their 412,000 boys if gay scout leaders are allowed to participate. "[T]he Scouting Movement as now constituted will cease to exist," Von G. Keetch, attorney for the Church of Latter-day Saints, threatened in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court last year, suggesting that other conservative religious denominations might follow the Mormons' lead.   Liberal groups within the Boy Scouts have countered the BSA's increasing identification with the religious right by invoking the organization's ecumenical past. As University of California at Davis Professor Jay Mechling writes in the soon-to-be-published On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth, "To maintain the position that homosexuality is immoral amounts to preferring some religions over others on this matter." The BSA "is acting like a church and is departing from the founders' principles." In fact, in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court, a number of more liberal denominations (including the United Methodist Church, Reform Judaism, and the Episcopal Diocese of Newark) pointed out that they - along with governmental sponsors - represent nearly 60 percent of all troops. "Contrary to [the BSA's] assertions ... our boys and young men do not participate in the Boy Scouts for the purpose of expressing the view that gay boys and men are immoral," they wrote. "It is our boys and young men that the BSA seeks to exclude from our Scout troops." This January the Union of American Hebrew Congregations - Reform Judaism's governing body - called on its congregants to withdraw their children from Boy Scout troops, stating that the BSA's position is "incompatible with our consistent belief that every individual - regardless of his or her sexual orientation - is created in the image of God." But perhaps no religious group has challenged the Boy Scouts' fundamentalism as vigorously as the Unitarian Universalists, a progressive denomination with some 217,000 members in North America. In 1992, in protest over the BSA's position on homosexuality, the Unitarians withdrew as an official sponsor, though individual churches still maintained troops. Then, in 1998, the BSA refused to rubber-stamp the "Religion in Life Award," the Unitarians' version of the decoration given to scouts by their sponsoring church based on the fulfillment of certain religious obligations. Historically the Boy Scouts have deferred to the religious institutions in the creation and conferring of the award. But, in this case, they objected to the inclusion, in the award's instruction manual, of material spelling out the Unitarians' "ongoing concern regarding the homophobic and discriminatory attitudes of the [BSA's] national leadership." A BSA spokesman claimed that the language "was just not consistent with Scouting's values, particularly regarding the commitment to duty to God and traditional family values." The president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Reverend John Buehrens (who was himself a Life Scout), disagrees. He believes the BSA simply "knuckled under to political pressure by those who pay the bills." Many Unitarian leaders, however, believing that scouting was worth saving, handed out the award anyway, without authorization.   Which begs the question: Is scouting worth the fight? The answer is yes. For, even in its tarnished state, the Boy Scouts does bring together boys from diverse economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, providing, in Robert Putnam's terms, "bridging social capital." Just witness the quadrennial National Jamboree, where scouts from Massachusetts and scouts from Utah fished, traded badges, and worked and prayed together. Until society, and the Boy Scouts with it, comes to a consensus about the equality of gays and lesbians, liberals should work to decentralize the BSA - allowing different troops to define their own moral and sexual rules, as they effectively did for most of the organization's history. As Jay Mechling writes, "[T]he Boys Scouts of America - that is, the legal corporation and the bureaucrats working in the office buildings of the national office and the council offices - is not the 'real' Boy Scouts in the sense that a boy experiences Scouting through a concrete group of men and boys." Conservatives might be hard-pressed to oppose this sort of local-control argument. Certainly, it made its appearance at the Jamboree, where several scouts expressed displeasure that headquarters was intruding on their troops' territory. "People think we're homophobic, but we have no power over that. It's all the head council," explained 14-year-old Joe Paul, a red-haired, freckled scout from Travis City, Michigan.   And decentralization is catching on among some scouting officials as well. This June representatives from nine of the largest metropolitan Boy Scout councils - Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, West Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orange County - proposed leaving membership policies to the local sponsoring institutions. Says Mike Harrison, former chairman of the Orange County Council, "To me, one of the strengths of the organization is that it has always been able to accommodate differing viewpoints, and the present position is totally inconsistent with that. We want to get the tribe back on track." Of course, remaining in the Boy Scouts would require liberals to tolerate a degree of moral discomfort. It would also require faith in the nation's moral progress: that the BSA will, over time, come to see nondiscrimination as the principle that best honors scouting's heritage. And it would require a belief that the Boy Scouts, by joining together children of different backgrounds in "a brotherhood of youth," can help achieve that progress. Should that time come, liberals, by refusing to abandon the organization even when it seems to have abandoned them, will - in the best tradition of the Scouts - be prepared. ([i]The New Republic, September 17, 2001; Benjamin Soskis)   http://www.bsatoday.org/#A Brief History

So if I think gay boys should have never been dismissed from BSA in the first place (and therefore have no problem with their decision to change their policy) I'm just a victim of gay/the left's propaganda? ;)  :dropjaw:

Really?  Tell me when, precisely, I "don't need my firearm" because it's heavy and uncomfortable and if you can tell me in advance when I "don't need it" I'd be more than happy to leave it in my safe.  ;)