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Persecution: California Moves to Strip Non-Profit Status from Boy Scouts, Other Groups that Ban Homosexuals, Transgendered or Athiests

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Photo Credit: AP

A bill aimed at pressuring the Boy Scouts of America to lift its ban on gay members by making the organization ineligible for nonprofit tax breaks cleared its first vote on Wednesday in the California Legislature.

The Senate Governance and Finance Committee voted 5 to 2 to move the first-of-its-kind bill to the Senate Appropriations Committee for review.

The Youth Equality Act, sponsored by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Long Beach, would deny tax-exempt status to youth groups that discriminate on the basis of gender identity, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion or religious affiliation.

That means those groups would have to pay corporate taxes on donations, membership dues, camp fees and other sources of income, as well as sales taxes on food, beverages and homemade items sold at fundraisers.

Former Boy Scouts of America president Rick Cronk appeared before the committee on Wednesday, telling members that Scouting has had a positive impact on the state and that being taxed on fundraising sales would hurt local troops.

Read more from this story HERE.

Boy Scouts Should Not Backtrack On Values

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Photo Credit: National Library of NorwayA national uproar apparently caused the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America to postpone until May a vote on whether to allow homosexual Scouts and Scoutmasters among their ranks.

After more than 100 years as a private organization with the highest of moral standards, top scouting officials had initially floated the idea of rescinding the prohibition on homosexual members and leaders after reaffirming their policy last summer.

This reaffirmation followed just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Scouts to set their own membership policy in regards to homosexuals in the 2008 case, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

Rather than resolving to uphold the Scout Law, which says that Scouts are to keep themselves “morally straight,” some members of the executive board began a covert campaign to change the policy. Two members of the executive board in particular were instrumental in pressuring their fellow board members to reconsider the ban.

Reportedly the strongest advocates for changing the common-sense policy were board members Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, and Jim Turley, CEO of Ernst & Young. Pro-family groups have called for their resignation from scouting, as well they should.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Calls on Boy Scouts to Welcome Homosexuals

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Photo Credit: tedeytanPresident Obama called on the Boy Scouts to open their ranks to homosexuals.

His response came during an interview ahead of Super Bowl XLVII. CBS News’ Scott Pelley asked the president if scouting should be open to gays.

“Yes,” the president replied. “Gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everyone else does.”

BSA national leaders are meeting this week in Dallas to discuss lifting a ‘no-gay’ ban on both members and leaders.

On Monday a group of 42 religious groups will publish a half-page ad in USA Today calling on the Scouts to resist political and economic pressures to lift the ban.

Read more from this story HERE.

Boy Scouts Likely to Approve Gay Leaders in Major Policy Reversal

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The Boy Scouts of America announced today, under pressure from questions raised by The Christian Post, that the organization is likely to allow professed homosexuals to become scout leaders and that a vote on the matter is scheduled at the group’s executive meeting in Irving, Texas, the first week of February.

When asked about the change by The Christian Post, BSA officials confirmed the major policy reversal just days before Scout Sunday, February 3, an annual event held in many churches around the country to promote and encourage participation in scouting. The organization originally planned to make the announcement at the Boy Scouts of America Annual Meeting in May.

A source who has knowledge of the situation told The Christian Post last week that the BSA’s top executives had met with top leaders at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, among others, over the last few weeks to inform them of the possibility of this policy shift.

Early Monday morning, the BSA responded to CP’s inquiry and released the following statement via email:

“For more than 100 years, Scouting’s focus has been on working together to deliver the nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training. Scouting has always been in an ongoing dialogue with the Scouting family to determine what is in the best interest of the organization and the young people we serve,” wrote Deron Smith, BSA’s Director of Public Relations.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Lawsuit Claims Boy Scouts Failed to Stop Pedophile in Midwest

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CHICAGO – A former Boy Scout who says he was sexually assaulted when he was 10 by his now-imprisoned former troop leader sued the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday, citing recently released files the group secretly maintained on suspected molesters in its ranks.

The lawsuit claims that the Boy Scouts allowed Thomas Hacker, a Scout leader barred from the group after a 1970s felony sex abuse conviction in Indiana, to rejoin as a volunteer in Illinois in the 1980s, and he went on to molest more boys, including the plaintiff.

Hacker was arrested in 1988 and convicted in 1989 of the aggravated sexual assault of an 11-year-old member of his troop in the southwest suburbs of Chicago.

Now 75, Hacker is serving two concurrent 50-year prison terms as a result of his conviction. His defense attorney in the 1989 case called him “a classic pedophile – and sick beyond that,” according to a Chicago Tribune story at the time.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday by a man identified only as John Doe claimed that Hacker sexually assaulted him when he was 10 years old — after Hacker re-joined the Scouts in Illinois.

Read more from this story HERE.

Atlantic Magazine: Boy Scouts must be taken “out behind the barn” and put down with a “shotgun”

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Photo credit: RDECOM

The website of The Atlantic magazine [last week] carries an article shocking in its use of incendiary and hateful rhetoric laden with violent imagery, all aimed at the Boys Scouts of America.

The article, by James Hamblin, a medical doctor and an editor for the magazine, attacks the BSA for its policy of not admitting gays as members or leaders. Hamblin also proposes that organizations like the Boy Scouts – a private organization – be forced to bend to the demands of the Left on gay rights based on a dangerous concept that could mean the end of First Amendment freedoms like the freedom of religion, speech and assembly.

Hamblin writes:

Boy Scouts is an organization that was and is so close to being great. Remember when they had to put Old Yeller down because he got rabies? It’s not like he was a bad dog, but he got a brain infection and he tried to eat Travis. He looked the same and wasn’t about to die, but the good dog who used to save him from bears and boars just wasn’t there anymore. The policy is embarrassing and archaic, sure. … But the real value in speaking against it is that it’s dangerous. When a group as massive (2.7 million youth members) and respected as the Boy Scouts makes a move like this, it stands to exacerbate a public health hazard in such a way that we can’t just agree to disagree.

Perpetuating a culture where gay teenagers — who are already commonly battling notions of inferiority and self-hatred — can be openly and decidedly told they aren’t welcome among a preeminent organization that purports to represent and define a standard of behavioral ideals, is dangerous. It’s a decided step back in rejecting the culture of gay bullying. We will see more depression, and more suicide. We’ll see more discrimination of every sort, and more hatred.

If the BSA won’t change, then the burden falls on a just society to take them out behind the barn with whatever sort of shotgun revokes credibility.

Imagine the outrage – justifiable – if the BSA issued a statement demanding gays be taken “behind the barn with whatever sort of shotgun” would convince them to stop being gay.

Read more from this story HERE.

 

Unlike Obama, Romney Comes Out in Support of Homosexual Boy Scout Leaders

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Photo credit: RDECOM

By Heather Clark.  A spokesperson for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has advised that the former Massachusetts governor disagrees with the Boy Scout’s current policy prohibiting open homosexuals from serving as members and leaders.

According to The Associated Press, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul told the news outlet in an email that Romney still stands by his beliefs that homosexual men should be able to serve in the organization. She specifically noted that Romney had outlined his views in 1994 during a political debate, and that his stance has not changed.

“I support the right of the Boy Scouts of America to decide what it wants to do on that issue,” Romney stated during the debate. “I feel that all people should be able to participate in the Boy Scouts regardless of their sexual orientation.”

As previously reported, last month, the Boy Scouts of America issued a statement reaffirming its policy prohibiting open homosexuals from joining the organization.

“The committee’s work and conclusion is that this policy reflects the beliefs and perspectives of the BSA’s members, thereby allowing Scouting to remain focused on its mission and the work it is doing to serve more youth,” the statement said. “The review included forthright and candid conversation and extensive research and evaluations — both from within Scouting and from outside of the organization.”  Read more from this story HERE.

Advocates: Romney backs gay scouts, Obama is silent

By Stephen Dinan. There is one social issue on which Mitt Romney is more liberal than President Obama — that of urging the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to accept gay scouts.

Mr. Romney said in 1994 that while it was up to BSA to set its own policy, he thought the scouts should allow gay boys in, and this week his campaign reaffirmed that stance to the Associated Press. The 1994 comments came as he was running to unseat then-Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in Massachusetts.

“I support the right of the Boy Scouts of America to decide what it wants to do on that issue. I feel that all people should be able to participate in the Boy Scouts regardless of their sexual orientation,” Mr. Romney said during a debate at the time.

Now Scouts for Equality, a group pushing for the national scouting group to allow gay boys to join, said it’s time for Mr. Obama — who as president is the honorary president of the scouts — to take the same stand.

“I’m happy to hear that Mitt Romney’s campaign confirmed his support for the participation of my family, and families like mine, in the Boy Scouts of America,” said Jennifer Tyrrell, a former cub scout den leader who is lesbian, said in a statement. “I think President Obama should also let the public know what he thinks about a cultural institution like the Boy Scouts banning gay Americans.”  Read more from this story HERE.

Huckabee stands his ground: “Boy Scouts made ‘right decision’ to exclude gays”

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[David Edwards reporting]:  Fox News host Mike Huckabee on Wednesday said that the Boy Scouts of America’s policy of discriminating against LGBT Americans was the “right decision” to protect young boys from being molested.

After a two-year review, Boy Scouts spokesperson Deron Smith on Tuesday announced that the discriminatory rule was “absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts.”  See story below.

“That is a right decision for the Boy Scouts,” Huckabee insisted on his radio show Wednesday as he took a call from a man who claimed he had been “molested” by Scout leaders as a boy.

“I believe that homosexuals try to target groups like that to try to get a leadership area in,” the man explained. “If there hadn’t been a homosexual in my troop, I wouldn’t have been traumatized for about three years.”

Huckabee recalled that Scout leaders had done the “same thing” in his troop when he was a boy.  Read more from this story HERE.

After review, Boy Scouts reaffirm ban on gays

[Associated Press reporting]: After a confidential two-year review, the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday emphatically reaffirmed its policy of excluding gays, ruling out any changes despite relentless protest campaigns by some critics.

An 11-member special committee, formed discreetly by top Scout leaders in 2010, “came to the conclusion that this policy is absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts,” the organization’ national spokesman, Deron Smith, told The Associated Press.

Smith said the committee, comprised of professional scout executives and adult volunteers, was unanimous in its conclusion — preserving a long-standing policy that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 and has remained controversial ever since.

As a result of the committee’s decision, the Scouts’ national executive board will take no further action on a recently submitted resolution asking for reconsideration of the membership policy.

The Scouts’ chief executive, Bob Mazzuca, contended that most Scout families support the policy, which applies to both leaders and Scouts.  Read more from this story HERE.

Photo Credit:  Joe Miller, All Rights Reserved.