FormerCubmaster

From the LDS standpoint—I don’t know that I’d phrase it *quite* that way. The LDS stayed in the BSA when it was announced that it would admit LGBTQ boys; it was when it announced that it would admit LGBTQ leaders that the church drew the line. Even then, I think this was less of a “red line” in and of itself than a straw that broke the camel’s back after a number of perceived problems and slights including: —perceived shabby treatment by the BSA national leadership, which had apparently promised the LDS that certain agenda items would *not* be brought up at board meetings that the LDS delegates couldn’t attend and then rammed those items through in the absence of the LDS delegates; —a perceived pattern of dishonesty by BSA national leadership by, for example, assuring GSUSA that the BSA wouldn’t start accepting girls and then doing it anyways; —a resultant inability to trust BSA National’s assurances that Mormon units would still be able to set the conditions for membership and/or leadership in their own organizations; —the BSA’s long-standing practice of treating the LDS like a cash cow (many councils would impose quotas on LDS troops for the annual Friends of Scouting drive, knowing that—when push came to shove—Mormon bishops would ask their congregants to open up their checkbooks, and that Mormon congregants would pay up); —perceived BSA bloat, financial profligacy, and mismanagement (for example, the BSA national leadership were paid over ten times the annual salary of the LDS Church’s global leadership, whose salary is a little less than your average council executive. And how on earth could shirts, patches, and booklets be THAT expensive?!?); —the overall financial costs of the Church’s BSA involvement, especially as compared to the relatively low costs of the Church’s in-house program for its elementary- and teenaged girls (and uncomfortable questions about why the Church was spending so much more on its boys than on its girls); and especially in conjunction with the perception that the Church’s programs for girls were just plain more effective at engaging and retaining youth into adulthood than the BSA was. —with the benefit of hindsight over the past 5 years, I wonder whether the Church felt it was going to be expected to subsidize claims against the BSA arising from non-LDS units, claimants, and/or perpetrators. —broad frustration with council red tape and nit-picking of local programs and the incessant recruiting demands for numbers, numbers, numbers; and the way local initiatives were frequently stymied by council-level naysayers. It was a popular sentiment among den leaders that the council was where good ideas went to die. I think the LDS and BSA could have worked through the LGBTQ issue if there was a modicum of trust among the stakeholders, and if BSA involvement was still fundamentally “working” for the LDS Church generally. But, those core elements just weren’t there anymore.

I should think it depends on whether joint and several liability is deemed to apply, which would differ by state. At the risk of grossly over-simplifying: If “pure joint and several liability” applies, then it’s easy peasy—the defendant who can pay (the church) pays the entire sum of damages, and the defendant who bankrupted out (BSA) walks away cleanly. If it doesn’t, the the jury has to allocate proportion of fault between each defendant; the award is allocated amongst the defendants in equal proportions, the church pays its portion and the bankrupt walks away with the plaintiff a haircut on his award. Given the way LDS units used to run, I would think they’d have to be deemed well over 50% liable for cases of sex abuse within each individual unit; maybe as high as 90-95%. It was the church that selected (and, at its discretion, removed) the unit leaders; and I’ll bet well over 90% of the claimants were LDS kids—they participated in those units not primarily because of the appeal of the BSA name and curriculum; but because that was the youth program that their own church congregations happened to be running.

Sort of. It’s had the same formal name since 1837-ish (“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”). The issue has always been that the full name is kind of a mouthful and lends itself to shortening; and there’s been some back-and-forth from the church leadership over the years about whether “Mormon” was an appropriate short form since the term as an appellation both was coined by detractors of the church and tends to distract from what we see as our commitment to Jesus. About every twenty or thirty years we get direction from church leaders saying “please, lay off the ‘Mormon’ thing”, and we spend a few years trying to change our ways, but we never quite pull ourselves out of the inertia, The most recent initiative has had a bit more “oomph” as church institutions like the former “Mormon Tabernacle Choir” and “Mormon Youth Symphony” have been been officially renamed and members have been asked to avoid even the “LDS” acronym. While the gesture of many on this forum (and the bankruptcy court) who have substituted “TCJC” for “LDS” is very much appreciated, I don’t see “TCJC” getting any traction within the church itself.

Yeah, I’ve frankly never seen it outside of discussions of the BSA bankruptcy. But, when in Rome . . . 🙂

Yes. There is a single corporation sole out of Salt Lake City that holds the deed to every LDS meetinghouse [actually two or three, but they are all indisputably under the control of the church’s central governing body]. All member donations are forwarded to Salt Lake City each week, and the central church leadership then turns around and funds each congregation’s annual operating budget on a per capita basis. All congregational bishops, too, are individually formally approved by Salt Lake prior to their ordination. (That’s how it works in the LDS Church within the USA, anyways. Other countries may run a little differently depending on laws governing nonprofit operation, restrictions on international funds transfers, and so on. But to the extent legally possible, the church’s operations up to and including its financial holdings are very tightly controlled out of Salt Lake. A financial judgment against one congregation is effectually a financial judgment against all of them.)

I think Kosnoff has suggested at times that the LDS church was the “power behind the throne” with the BSA and should be jointly and severally liable on every single claim against the BSA. If he has evidence of that, then I suppose it will come out through the legal system in due course. But the specific instances cited in the new article have to do with very narrow circumstances in which perpetrators made a confession to an ecclesiastical leader which, depending on the legal jurisdiction where it occurred, may have been subject to legal privilege; and it sounds like the church’s legal advisors may have given bad advice with regard to whether such a disclosure can legally be reported under Arizona law specifically. In Oregon recently there was a case where the ecclesiastical leader *did* report such a disclosure to the legal authorities, and as a result the church was sued for violating clerical privilege. In a broader context, where clerical privilege doesn’t apply, the official church policy (though sadly, sometimes honored more in the breach than in the observance as individual bishops take it upon themselves to “help a good man repent” while keeping him out of jail/preserve his family and profession and social standing) has long been to report the abuse to the legal authorities. The controversial thing (and I believe this has come up on this very forum) is whether it’s appropriate for anyone, LDS or not, to seek legal advice before making a report of child abuse; and a lot of people are really uncomfortable with the Church having institutionalized and mandated any sort of pre-reporting legal-advice-seeking process for its hierarchy. See, eg, https://publicsquaremag.org/editorials/are-reported-sexual-abuse-cases-exceptional-or-illustrative-of-the-church-of-jesus-christ/ and https://www.deseret.com/2022/8/5/23292405/i-survived-abuse-church-help-line-ap-story-broke-my-heart-latter-day-saints-associated-press-mormon

Indeed; and the LDS have ample resources to address this sort of thing. If they bail, does that have any ramifications for other CORs? My understanding was that early on, there was talk that the LDS offer was seen as a sort of benchmark that other CORs would be expected to meet (and kind of a high one, at that). Does their absence create a space for the other CORs to renegotiate their own liability?

There’s little reason for them to participate now. The judge appeared to characterize “pure scouting” claims as scenarios where non-LDS kids participate in LDS units and are victimized by LDS unit leaders. This would likely be an infinitesimal percentage of claimants—the vast majority of claims involving LDS units will be “mixed claims”, because nearly all adult LDS males (including, sadly, the dirtbags who perpetrate SA) are ordained into the faith’s lay clergy. There’s simply no reason for the LDS church to help the BSA pay off the BSA’s obligation to LDS victims who are just going to turn around and sue the church for more anyways. They may as well approach the victims with settlement offers directly (or, wait around to be sued).

At least in my state, CPS won’t investigate child-on-child verbal bullying unless there is an element of physicality to it or unless the victim and perp live together. (Threats of physical violence would be referred to law enforcement, not CPS.)

It seems to me that via manuals, charter agreements, etc. BSA has been telling the units sotto voce for a while that “all your toys REALLY belong to us”. The warnings/reminders seem to be getting increasingly intense, and are starting to smack of demands. It seems clear to me that with traditional chartering/sponsoring civic organizations—churches, Lions/Rotary clubs, Masonic lodges, etc—on the decline, and with the high startup costs for new units of an outdoors-based program like the BSA, BSA isn’t going to be able to attain its stated goal of better serving underprivileged kids unless there is a substantial redistribution of resources from the established units to the newer ones. Why should Troop 89’s tents, stoves, trailer, etc sit unused for three weeks out of the month when there are three other units who don’t have that kind of gear and who will never be able to acquire it because of structural inequities within our social system? Modern conceptions of equity and justice demand that Troop 89 share the wealth. It’s no skin off my nose at this point—I was with an LDS unit for about 12 years, and we’re well out of the Scouting game now. But our unit’s relationship with the council/BSA for nearly all of that time was roughly equivalent to the relationship between a milk cow and a farmer (assuming the milk cow has to pay for all its own food, plus paying rent to the farmer, plus having the farmer throw a shovelful of manure at the cow once or twice a week just because he can). Now that the Mormons are gone, it looks an awful lot to me like BSA has chosen the Methodist units as their next cash cow. I’d run away, if I were them.

1. I suppose it depends on how carefully the distinction between the scouting unit and the CO is maintained. The old LDS paradigm, of course, was that the chartering org (church congregation) sponsored the unit with the intent and expectation that the unit would *be* the church youth program for the sons of the families in that particular congregation. Additional visitors who wanted to participate in that experience were welcome to join (just as they would be welcome to join Sunday worship services); but Scouting as a program was always subordinate the overall interests and needs and objectives of the church congregation. In colloquial conversation amongst church members, there was rarely a reason to distinguish between the Boy Scout troop and the boys’ youth group. 2. Because of the way LDS units were run, permanently expelling a boy from the pack/troop would be tantamount to expelling him from the church congregation itself. Obviously you never want to do that, regardless of whether the boy is a “member” or merely a “visitor”; but per our theology “membership” implies enhanced mutual communitarian obligations to look out for and help one another. If the family still wants the kid participating in church (or, when we were using the program, Scouts), then so long as the kid isn’t posing an actual safety risk to others we would (hopefully) bend over backwards to try to make things work out no matter how obnoxious the kid is being.

Yeah, that sounds accurate; but with the clarification that (at least when I was going through the program as a youth after the age of 12) there was basically no distinction, for practical purposes, between “weekly church night” and “weekly Scout meetings”. Any suggestion that there was a quid pro quo, “if you want to come to our Scouts meeting on Tuesday you must also come to our church youth group meeting on Wednesday”, doesn’t really capture the dynamic that was at play—the two were one and the same meeting.

For what it’s worth, when I was a cubmaster in an LDS congregation (and when I previously worked with 11 year olds in a different LDS congregation) (and when I grew up as a scout in yet another LDS congregation), church membership wasn’t a prerequisite for troop or pack membership. Non-LDS kids generally weren’t interested in our units precisely because of our religious affiliation; but the one or two who *did* show interest and didn’t mind being seen in the company of a bunch of Mormons were welcomed. We saw it as an outreach/fellowshipping opportunity. I suppose if a particular non-LDS kid were engaging in particularly disruptive behavior, then at some point we may have had to pull the plug; but I never saw anything like that happen. So FWIW—even as a Mormon myself, I have no idea why one would want to limit troop membership to adherents to the denomination of the chartering organization. I’m a bit of a libertarian at heart, so I prefer to see the COs given the option—but I can’t imagine why they’d want to take it.

Or a “People who wouldn’t touch the clowns and grifters in National Leadership with a ten foot pole” group?

BSA was only supposed to be apolitical when its membership leaned rightward. As the organization’s demographics evolve, it will naturally be expected to take a greater role in social activism.

Or . . . maintain a 24-hour hotline that can connect them with jurisdiction-specific legal advice in almost-real time? I mean—if the BSA had contemporaneously, immediately referred every staffer who heard an abuse allegation to an actual lawyer who could advise the staff member of their legal obligations to report (as opposed to just falling back on policy and years-old trainings)—would the BSA be in the pickle it’s in? If any of the less-than-1/5 of states with “immediate” reporting requirements has an issue with the Church’s practice, they certainly have the information and resources to take corrective action. So far, they haven’t . . . so all we have is online grousing about an internal church procedure that may result in a CPS report being made at 1:00 a.m. rather than 9:00 pm.

Hmm. That gets trickier in the case of Mormonism, since we have a lay clergy at the congregational level whose institutional training is almost nil and who are holding down day jobs while putting an additional 20-30+ hours per week into their ecclesiastical responsibilities. And again, as I pointed out above—there are practicing lawyers who get this stuff wrong unless or until they have a chance to do additions research and/or get advice from a colleague. I’m not sure it’s realistic or fair to hold some poor schcmuck who had the misfortune to be assigned the job of a Mormon bishop, to a higher standard than what we would expect of a practicing attorney—particularly when the worst-case-scenario net result is simply a few hours’ delay on a legally-required report. At some point, criticism of this nature becomes less about bona fide child safety and more about having found a convenient bludgeon to beat up on institutions we are already predisposed to dislike.

I’m not sure obeying a cop who is demanding you pull over right now, and a layman’s knowing the ins and outs of mandatory reporter statutes, are quite in the same category. I routinely interact professionally with people (including lawyers) who don’t know the reporting requirements in my own jurisdiction. Im not really “advocating” anything, just offering explanations for why the LDS church does things the way that they do. As I noted earlier—making a report of information received during a clerical confession when one is legally bound to keep it silent (as is the case in some jurisdictions) can in and of itself expose a religious organization to civil liability. Actions may well be required in one state that would be illegal the next state over. There have been dark suggestions made in this thread to the effect that the Mormon church views itself as being above the law, or that the hotline exists primarily as an attempt to keep the legal authorities in the dark about incidents of child abuse whenever possible; I don’t think those suggestions are either fair or accurate. As you probably noted in the form, callers to the hotline are given the personal/home cell numbers of the Church’s designated legal specialists in this field—this is not a situation where Mormon bishops are waiting for days or weeks to hear back as to whether they need to make a report. So far as I am aware, *no* American jurisdiction has held the LDS Church or its functionaries (or, off the top of my head, anyone else regardless of institutional affiliation) criminally liable for taking a couple of extra hours to get legal advice before reporting child abuse to the relevant authorities.

Sure; but to obey the law, a person first needs to know what the law is. Where a church stands liable for any failure of its functionaries to obey the law, it makes sense for the church to ensure that its functionaries have a means of learning the law—hence the hotline; which (as I think I pointed out earlier) takes pains to NOT actually receive “reports” of abuse in any meaningful way.

That’s probably why the LDS Church’s form explicitly tells the hotline worker *not* to take any personally identifying info as to the perp or victims. It’s not technically a report, it’s simply a person seeking legal guidance as to whether they are obligated to make a report (or, conversely, whether they are obligated to remain silent). At the end of that call, the church’s honchos still have no idea exactly where, to whom, or by whom the abuse was perpetrated.

If I may add some perspective here (I am a practicing Mormon and also a government attorney representing DCFS in my state): The reason the LDS legal hotline exists is that penitent-priest privilege laws differ by state. The Church was recently sued, for example, by a woman whose husband’s ecclesiastical leader *did* make a report to the authorities; she claimed he had violated the privilege and since he went to jail the wife demanded several million dollars in lost income, loss of consortium, ad nauseum. The attorneys staffing the legal hotline give church leaders the resources they need to comply with the legal requirements that specifically apply to their home jurisdictions. In my state, penitent-priest privilege does not apply to reports or confessions of child abuse; and because we are a Mormon-heavy state we frequently get DCFS cases that began with a referral from either LDS leaders or church attorneys acting on behalf of those leaders. What Church practice was in the 1920s or 1950s or 1970s, I cannot say; though for whatever it’s worth (probably not much, in a forum such as this!) I am inclined to agree with Mr. Lambert that the LDS Church’s scriptures tend strongly towards the idea that “repentance” entails an obligation to square oneself with the law. On a more pedantic note: while I’d agree that the LDS Church was a strong voice for cultural conservatism within the BSA, I’m not sure it’s quite accurate to suggest that it was we who made the BSA adopt these policies in the first place. It’s not like we cast a mind-control ray at Baden-Powell in 1908 and forced him to tailor his program to biological males, for example; or to include duty to “God and King” in the original Scout Oath. (If any of y’all know of a church that can do time-traveling mind control, please let me know. I’d go to that church. )