Dear Sirs:
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When the thinly disguised homosexual privileges ordinance passed in city council, there were many who accurately predicted that it would eventually be used for purposes well beyond the original stated intent. Now we have people using the ordinance to bash the Boy Scouts, a group that has done more good for America than 99 percent of the organizations in the country, and which has never spent any of its time or money spreading antihomosexual rhetoric or actions. No, what we have with the “gay community” is a political group who wants to go beyond “tolerance” to actively crush to its will any group that even dares to disagree with it.
The Boy Scouts of America have two concerns: the first is keeping child molesters away from their scouts. This is not an unreasoned fear. The book Scout’s Honor, released last year, contains the highlights of literally thousands of cases of child molestation by scout leaders that were buried in scout files. The Boy Scouts for years kept dealing with the problem as if each case was isolated, but slowly came to realize that the whole structure of scouting is intrinsically a “target rich environment” for child molesters, who are documented as gravitating towards careers that put them into contact with young children. Radical reforms in how scout leaders may interact with scouts (e.g., no sleeping in the same tent) were enacted in recognition of this problem.
Ross Pavlac
