The bosses of the Boy Scouts of America surprised everyone this week by postponing their decision on whether to allow gay leaders and gay Scouts to join their ranks.
If the BSA’s long-standing ban on gays is lifted by national officials in May, the choice to admit gays may be left to local Boy Scout chapters — as it should be.
If you’re asking me if I’d put my child in a Boy Scout troop with a leader who is a known homosexual, I would answer on the side of caution and say “No.”
But despite what some of my conservative friends think, allowing gays in the Boy Scouts will not be an open invitation to pedophiles to begin preying on children.
Being gay doesn’t mean you are a pedophile. Homosexuality and pedophilia are two completely different issues and studies show that a child is no more at risk of being molested by a gay or bisexual man than a heterosexual one.
As someone who was sexually molested by a camp counselor when I was eight, I know more than I care to about pedophilia and the long-lasting harm it does to children. You can read about my experience and what I learned from it in “Twice Adopted,” my 2004 book.
Pedophilia is the most heinous crime against children. But as the newspaper headlines have been telling us for a long time, some of our most famous institutions have a shameful record of coddling the child molesters who work for them.
Everyone knows by now how the men in power at Penn State chose not to tell the police about the serial pedophilia of former football coach Jerry Sandusky because they were afraid to sully the reputation of their “sacred” athletic program. Meanwhile, for years Sandusky was free to prey on new victims.
Penn State’s decision to protect its institutional reputation was nothing new. According to HBO’s scathing new documentary “Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa,” the Catholic Church — my church — has implemented a similar policy whenever pedophiles are discovered in its sanctuaries and schools.
From Wisconsin to Ireland to the Vatican, HBO showed that the church’s bishops and cardinals have a long and disgusting history of protecting pedophile priests, ignoring children’s allegations of sexual abuse, paying the parents of victims to keep quiet and keeping the sex crimes of priests secret from law enforcement.
In my hometown, we’ve recently been learning from the Los Angeles Times how for decades the hierarchy of the Los Angeles diocese “plotted to keep law enforcement from learning that children had been molested at the hands of priests.”
The BSA’s similar method of dealing with child molesters in its ranks also has been exposed by the L.A. Times.
The BSA’s own files revealed that between 1970 and 1991 officials chose not to tell police about hundreds of alleged sexual abuses, and in some cases allowed the molesters to continue working or volunteering with the organization.
In one case, the Times reported last fall, a camp director who heard about repeated abuse by a staff member told police he didn’t report them because “his bosses wanted to protect the reputation of the Scouts and the accused staff member.”
The men who run the Boy Scouts have something in common with the men who run the Catholic Church and Penn State. When it comes to dealing with the sexual abuse of children, they’ve always chosen to protect their own institutions instead of protecting children.
Pedophilia can be prevented and guarded against, but it’s impossible to eliminate. But from now on, when it is discovered, the perpetrators — who on average molest about 120 victims during their “career” — should be indicted and punished as criminals.
This should be the case no matter who they are, whether they’re straight or gay, or what institution they work for. Our innocent children deserve no less.
KaD says:
The crazy thing is the best way to truly protect the reputation of any organization would be to report these incidences as quickly as possible, thoroughly investigate, and prosecute to the maximum extent the pedophiles. Hiding and evading does exactly the opposite-sullies the institution indefinitely.
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10th February 2013 at 11:27 am
Eddie says:
Pedophiles always end up in Scouts and also in church youth groups. This is not by accident. Parents perpetuate this kind of problem by being far to eager to give responsibility for their kids to any adult who offers, within the socially acceptable structures of schools, religious organizations and various youth organizations. Free babysitting is hard to pass up, evidently.
I agree with this article that accepting gays will not lead to an increased incidence of child molestation.
It might however, lead to an increase in song and dance revues involving show tunes, and might promote listening to old Barbra Streisand and Patti LaBelle records.
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10th February 2013 at 12:29 pm
crazyivan says:
http://i.qkme.me/2pea.jpg
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10th February 2013 at 1:31 pm
crazyivan says:
Don’t get mad.
Practice makes perfect.
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10th February 2013 at 1:32 pm
Muck About says:
I don’t know about gay scouting. I sure know that I would have enjoyed coed scouting back when I was a Scout..
MA
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10th February 2013 at 1:37 pm
flash says:
Any adult male who want to spend quality time with kids of no relation is likely to be a child predator..be very suspicious.
I’m mean if the dork is getting a fat check to put on a smiley face, then..
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10th February 2013 at 1:42 pm
Stucky says:
All this can be virtually eliminated if the penalties were STIFFER.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQtp8BXS24A&playnext=1&list=PL83140B3D63BB624F&feature=results_video
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10th February 2013 at 2:06 pm
bluestem says:
Let them create ” The Gay Scouts of America” and be done with it, Same with “Gay Marriage”, let them have ‘”Gay Unions” and be done with it. John
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10th February 2013 at 2:24 pm
Eddie says:
Mr. Rogers, gay? Who could ever think such a thing?
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10th February 2013 at 2:31 pm
Ron says:
I dont trust anyone alone with my kids.The crap the schools teach mine makes me wonder about the future. Any man who wants to hang out with little boys,forget it. To bad its a sick world.
Catholic priest,its just not normal or rational to expect men not to want to get they’re rocks off.They should be allowed to marry.Wasn’t this the thing about Protestants?
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10th February 2013 at 5:36 pm
llpoh says:
Gays suck.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
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10th February 2013 at 9:43 pm
Novista says:
Women priests in easly Christianity?
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/02.03/apocrypha.html
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10th February 2013 at 9:48 pm
efarmer says:
Admin,
Congrats. It appears the pressure you put on the Pope was more than he could take and has resigned.
The power of TBP.
EF
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10th February 2013 at 7:02 am
KaD says:
Yes, the first pope in over 600 years to resign for ‘health reasons’. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/11/pope-benedict-xvi-to-resi_n_2660670.html
Right. I think this commentary nails it:
The first Pope in 600 years to resign…hmm, wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that he personally oversaw the cover-up of all the child sex abuse scandals in the last quarter century, would it? How about the fact that HBO is running an expose documenting the many crimes of the Catholic Church, and this Pope in particular, and that he has nowhere left to hide?
According to a review in the L.A. Times, filmmaker “…Gibney takes great pains to point out that every sex abuse case, including Murphy’s, went directly to the office of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 until 2005 and now Pope Benedict XVI. Yet year after year, known pedophiles such as Murphy were allowed to remain free and to remain priests, often in parishes where they had access to children. It was only after Kouhut and other victims filed a civil suit against the Vatican, that the church was forced to release documents making it clear that in many cases officials knew about the abuse and refused to act.”
Now then…where are the handcuffs? IMHO, the upper echelon of the Catholic Church should be brought up on RICO charges for conspiring to sexually abuse thousands of children in the U.S. (and abroad), as well as be charged for conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Yes, I am saying it – this particular Pope belongs in prison for his direct involvement in facilitating the sexual abuse of thousands of children around the globe.
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10th February 2013 at 11:40 am
Hollow man says:
The scouts arejust evolving a little slowerthan everybody else, lol. I am regressing in the view of our evaloutionary leap to embrace what killed many other societies before us. It just aint right.
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10th February 2013 at 11:32 pm