Check out Scouts For Equality to see people doing exactly that. This change didn’t come out of nowhere - there have been internal change agents all along. A lot of good people weren’t willing to give up on BSA and just walk away, and have worked hard to save it from itself.
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Pick something, anything, that your government (is it the US government?) is doing that you think is wrong/evil. Have you found one thing? What are you waiting for, why haven’t you emigrated yet?
It’s a choice between “fighting for justice”, “going along” and “walking away”. Where “walking away” is a good choice if and only if what you’re walking away from can be replaced more easily than it can be repaired.
I don’t want to create the kind of justice where America is represented in international Scouting by a once-big but now tiny and marginalized, ultra-bigoted (because all remotely decent people left) BSA, while decent American kids have to make do with a reasonably progressive but provincial (a.k.a. “nationwide”) organisation that has no ties to international Scouting.
The BSA will be the Scouting organisation of the United States of America until more than half of the planet (and not just 90% of “Western” scouts) are disgusted with its policies. Then it can be kicked out and replaced by something decent. But by the time that happens, many decades (a century?) will have passed and scouting in America will essentially have been destroyed. Or, it can be reformed from the inside. Which has a chance to work much faster, with less collateral damage.
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I can compromise with the reasonable right; there are legitimate arguments to be had about the role of governments in economic policy and the balance between markets and regulation. I think that I’m right, but I recognise that I might be wrong, and the best answer may lie somewhere in the middle.
But when it comes to race/gender/sexual orientation/etc, then no: there is no middle ground. You either support equal civil rights or you don’t. And valuing the collegiality of international scouting above the civil rights of GLBT people is not a sacrifice that I am willing to make.
And now you don’t have to. A lot of LGBT and LGBT-supportive scouters have been fighting that battle for you, and we’re winning.
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But you are compromising. You’re sacrificing the right of LGBT youths in the US to join international Scouting.
Your proposed means of fighting for the civil rights of LGBT people starts off by making that sacrifice. And as a member of the perfectly inclusive scouting organisation of Austria, that’s a sacrifice I’m not willing to make.
Also, I challenge you to find a “reasonable compromise somewhere in the middle” about whether to torture suspected terroristspeople. Yet I still don’t think that all decent people should have left America when Bush started torturing.
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Nope, they’ll just sit in their mormon and baptist-sponsored facilities, and keep on keepin’ on with the bigotry, just like always. While the more liberal church-sponsored ones won’t say a word about this, because orientation wasn’t ever a big deal for them anyway, because they’re not assholes. And the secular troops, those will be the ones marching in the pride parade and actually having a good time with EVERYONE.
More like, they’ve hit that intersection on the curve where loss of mormon funding is now equal to the number of secular funders who might come back. They’ve only gone public with this because they’ve noticed they’ve hit that inflection in their income curve.
Make no mistake, national leadership of the BSA is a pyramid scheme. They’re more of a standards organization than anything else. Troops have to fund themselves and pay dues. So basically national leadership is mostly irrelevant to anything a troop does, besides provide a uniform color scheme and publish a pretty-well written and edited textbook (scout manual. Not quite as useful as military manuals, but there’s only one scout manual, instead of hundreds of mil-spec manuals for everything.)
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They should have overthrown Bush when he started torturing. My fellow-citizens were amongst those he tortured (and we aren’t going to forget that for a very long time. Neither will the rest of the world).
No, that never had a realistic chance of happening. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t the right thing to do.
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They should have. Ideally, they should have impeached him, because torture is a crime, after all. And he should be in prison now.
But my point is “staying and fighting” vs. “leaving”. If you had no realistic chance of overthrowing Bush before the 2008 election, it was still a moral course of action to stay in America and prepare to vote when the time comes. If everyone opposed to torture had immediately left the country, America would now be beyond redemption.
Sorta like the Catholics.
“Overthrowing the American government” is a big deal. Splitting international scouting into two camps (bigoted vs less-bigoted) is not.
Inconvenient, unpleasant and costly? Yes. Worth abandoning global GLBT rights? No.
How about the Russians?
Wait. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Global LGBT rights are not threatened by the BSA. And definitely not by scouting.
The BSA is a member of WOSM (World Organisation of the Scout Movement), and so are all the non-bigoted scouting organisations. Having non-bigoted Americans leave the BSA and letting it become a marginalized organisation of bigots will not split international scouting. It will only cut off decent Americans from international scouting.
The scouting organisations of Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc. also are members of WOSM. Saudi Arabia certainly won’t accept a gay atheist scout leader, but I have no reason to believe that Saudi Arabian scouts are any more bigoted than Saudi Arabia in general, so either I stop all international relations with Saudi Arabia because they’re bigoted scum (that way lies World War III), or I welcome the Saudi scouts as brothers in scouting.
So, are you suggesting that there should be no international youth movements, or no international organisations of any kind, as long as LGBT rights are not universal on this planet? That sounds rather… bigoted, doesn’t it?
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Guys, guys, why are we fighting, when Camp Quest exists, and adults can volunteer with or donate to Foundation Beyond Belief and its disaster recovery teams?
The whole point of scouting is to prepare young people to be good citizens of the world, same with Camp Quest, and FBB. Except neither of them are beholden to racist, bigoted, sexist, religious organizations for their funding.
We ought to promote them, and what they do, rather than nit-picking about scouting, and I say this as a former eagle scout as well. The only advantage scouting has over camp quest et al, is name recognition. At least in the states.
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There are so many reasons why we should isolate Saudi Arabia from the community of civilized nations that scouting becomes almost ridiculous.
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We (the pride marching fun loving troop) run into those other troops once a year at summer scout camp. They really don’t seem to be having as much fun - which is probably why our troop is thriving and theirs are generally about 1/10th the size of ours.
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Heh, and they say, “size doesn’t matter”. Obviously not, when you have mormon tabernacle levels of money behind you. That’s second to only the catholics, as far as organizational avarice and mendaciousness goes.
Actually the Mormon troops have their own week at camp so we don’t see much of them at all. They kind of have their own version of scouting - including, up until the mid 1970s, a prohibition on black scouts in leadership positions (because religion).
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In Western Washington, the mormon troops are fully part of scouting. My methodist-sponsored troop (sure you betcha) hosted contingencies from mormon troops during certain events, and mormon facilities were available to us for things like rest stops and overnight base-camps. They were weird. And the mormon troops always required us to listen to a speil about “modern miracles” and “true soul mates”. It was a pitch designed to try to recruit evangelical fundamentalists into mormonism. I saw it for the bullshit it was, but wasn’t smart enough at the time to realize that knowing the truth is better than feeling good, or even feeling confident.
So I can be a queer and an atheist, but do I also have to promise to be a “Square”?
