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| The Boy Scouts of America have declared bankruptcy and the Family Research Council wants to blame gays for it. |
On Tuesday morning, when I read that the Boy Scouts had declared bankruptcy, I knew it would be a short matter of time before a religious right group would attempt to blame gays. I should have placed a bet on it, including the name of the group who would probably be first with the nonsense -
The Family Research Council:
It's one of the saddest, most predictable "I-told-you-so" moments of our generation. The Boy Scouts, where future moon walkers and presidents learned the virtues and value of leadership, has finally collapsed. Turns out, the decade of compromise hasn't been kind to the Scouts, who turned in their moral compass seven years ago to chase the approval of critics it could never win. Now, deep into the BSA's self-imposed identity crisis, the group is filing for bankruptcy -- an unhappy ending we all warned was coming.
For those who knew the Scouts through their proud and honorable days, the demise has been slow and painful. But this is what comes of throwing up your hands on a century of conviction: irrelevance and, ultimately, insolvency. For 103 of its 110 years, the Boy Scouts were a pillar of principle -- not that it was easy. As most of us know, the fight to live out your beliefs in this world can be an exhausting one. The Scouts spent years in court just for the freedom to stick to their moral code. They won -- but to the organization's dismay -- the battle didn't end. Waves of LGBT activists kept coming. The pressure built and built until finally, in 2013, under the leadership of Rex Tillerson, headquarters gave into the lie that compromise would be their salvation. Seven years later, the irony is: there's nothing left to save.
More than a half-decade into this radical experiment, the group that counted Martin Luther King, Jr., George W. Bush, and Buzz Aldrin as members is barely recognizable. A handful of local councils have managed to squeak by on solid reputations, but after the organization opened its arms to kids and leaders who identify as gay or transgender, membership became anemic. Then in a failed effort to fill the ranks they began recruiting girls, which not only angered its base -- but pitted the organization in a legal war with Girl Scouts USA. Now, a program that used to be America's finest, is knee-deep in Chapter 11.
If you're wondering where raising a white flag on core values leads, this is it. The Scouts are a case study in moral compromise -- the story of anyone who exchanges the truth for cowardly conformism. Leaders at the BSA dropped their moral mandate to accommodate what they don't believe. In the current climate, that's called "inclusion." To everyone else, it's considered betrayal.
Like so many other times when FRC and its president Tony Perkins choose to make comments about social issues - particularly regarding the LGBTQ community - they are telling a pack of lies.
Or in this case, one huge lie.
The Boy Scouts are not declaring bankruptcy because of any "attempt to compromise its values." Nor is the organization declaring bankruptcy because of the 2013 decision to allow gays to openly join or allowing girls to join.
The Boy Scouts declared
bankruptcy because of a
multitude of lawsuits regarding child sex abuse allegations which go back decades to the 1940s and maybe even before then. And of course, none of this has anything to do with women or the LGBTQ community.
