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Monday, August 13, 2012

The Boy Scouts Of America Has It Backwards

By upholding their ban on gay members and leaders, are they mistakenly confusing homosexuality with pedophilia?

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) recently announced that, after a two-year review, they were sticking to their long-standing policy of excluding openly gay youth and adults as members and leaders. (This is in stark contrast to the Girl Scouts, who have no exclusionary membership policies around sexual preference.)

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times broke an extremely troubling story about the BSA’s failure to prevent some known and suspected sexual predators from being scout leaders or volunteers, despite an awareness of their abusive behavior.

Examining recently released files from 1970 to 1991, the Times found “more than 125 cases across the country in which men allegedly continued to molest Scouts after the organization was first presented with detailed allegations of abusive behavior.” Some of these repeat offenses were attributed to “clerical errors, computer glitches or the Scouts’ failure to check their own “perversion files,” a confidential blacklist designed to identify potential predators. But the BSA also chronically failed to report complaints of abuse to law enforcement or child protective services.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pedophilia and homosexuality are both perversions of nature
and have no place around impressionable children.Another thing they have in common is they want at children.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, the BSA has it right on this policy.

Anonymous said...

They are not confusing anything - they don't want members who are queer, period. That pedophiles have slipped amongst them ( they generally don't announce their proclivity publicly like queers do) is a shame and every suspicion needs the highest level of awareness and, where found, action to remove and prosecute the offenders.