David CO

The forum member has been successful in his harassment. My notice box is crammed with countless downvote messages. I can no longer effectively participate on the forum. My many years of participation on this forum are over. Goodbye.

I would normally agree with the moderator policy, but this is an unusual circumstance. The main topic of the day is the bankruptcy / lawsuits. Billions of dollars are at stake. People will gain or lose money depending on the outcome. There is more than arguments to be won. There is real money to be won. Members have used this forum to encourage other members to vote for or against the plan. The forum is no longer an observer and commentator on the bankruptcy. The forum has become a platform for the various parties to influence the results.

I've got that beat. One forum member is going back through all of my past posts and indiscriminately down-voting every post I've ever made. I get over 40 notices of these downvotes when I log on to the forum. I don't care in the slightest about my tally upvotes and downvotes. What does bother me is the fact that by constantly cluttering up my notice box, he forces me to ignore all of my notices. I don't bother going through them anymore. So I am often left unaware when a friendly forum member has replied to one of my posts, leaving me unable to give them a polite response in return. If any of you have felt snubbed on account of my not responding to a joke or friendly post, please take no offense from it. It is not intentional. I don't have the time or inclination to read notices anymore. My apologies.

I disagree. There are people and groups who would like to use the courts to destroy scouting, even if there is little to be financially gained from it. This is a culture war.

Yes it could. If that should happen, some new scout association would take over where BSA left off. WOSM is not going to just abandon the USA. Scouting will continue.

For 70 years, they barely mentioned the child sexual abuse. I seriously doubt the newspapers will now be interested in a paper eagle story. This is the least of the incidents we should be worried about right now.

There is one particular lie that I have had to deal with in every Health class I have ever taught over my 40 year career. The lie is that a persons clothing choices are responsible for their abuse. The lie is that victims are "asking for it" by the way they choose to dress. I have heard this lie over and over again from both students and parents. It drives me nuts. I always tell my students that their clothing choices have absolutely nothing to do with any sexual abuse they might experience. Abuse victims are not responsible for the actions of their abuser on account of their clothing choices. The abuser is responsible.

Yes, but so are the lies. It can be difficult sometimes to distinguish between the two.

Many kids are uncomfortable wearing form-fitting tights. As correctly stated on The Breakfast Club, tights are the regulation uniform for the wrestling team. Tights are required for participation on some dance activities. Male dancers are often expected to perform shirtless if the choreography calls for it. These are two examples of when such a requirement or transaction is acceptable. I'm sure there are many others. The fact that people can come up with other examples where such a requirement or transaction in not acceptable does not change anything.

It wouldn't surprise me if the eagle scout in your post becomes a council employee.

I'm predicting that a "Child Protection Committee" will not just be overseeing the rules, it will be creating its own rules. Just like an activist Supreme Court, we will have an activist CPC. Various posts on this topic illustrative of what such a committee might do. It might unilaterally declare that boys can not take off their shirts at scout activities. No discussion. No vote. Just an edict from the committee, and that's it. I am not in favor of having such an undemocratic BSA. I have frequently complained that the current leadership is undemocratic and unresponsive to its membership. I don't want to replace it with a BSA that is even more so.

Thank you for making my point. The Native American cultures of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries are not portrayed or described accurately by the scouts who claim to "honor" them. The truth is that most people today despise that culture as much as our ancestors did. If Native Americans had not been forced to assimilate into our Western culture by past generations of Americans, we would probably be forcing them to do so today. We would be doing so under the banner of child protection. We would be forcibly removing children from their families and putting them into government run facilities. As we speak, politicians are decrying the actions of our forefathers and calling for public apologies and reparations. This is hypocrisy. These politicians would never allow Native Americans to return to their culture as it was practiced in previous centuries. That culture offends modern sensibilities.

All of our activities are supervised by adults, so that's a given.

Please don't put words into my mouth. I never said the band or cheer squads stripped down to their skivvies. I never said anyone stripped down to their skivvies (underwear).

I agree. I looked at the web site. Yes, there was cultural appropriation. But I didn't see anything that came close to pornography. There was nothing more revealing than the sort of things I see every fall weekend in the stands of a football game.

I don't know why. They've always been willing to lift a finger to me.

YPT goes out the window when the rules aren't fair enough.

It's been about 30 years since I've seen boys wearing loincloths with NA regalia, but I've seen a lot of girls wearing string bikinis, which are even more revealing than loincloths. If you want people to follow rules, you need to have some degree of fairness in the rules. BSA would have a hard time telling girls to dress more modestly, knowing that they would get an immediate outcry about body shaming. The Chartered Organizations have the same problem. It's not a hill most CO's want to die on. When I was a kid, boys were allowed to be a lot less modest than girls. Now it is the exact opposite. Maybe we should make our rules meet somewhere in the middle. Not necessarily the same rules, but rules that require a similar amount of modesty.

I have no idea. I've never experienced anything like it. Yet people tell me it's everywhere. I don't see it, but people tell me it exists. I sometimes feel like a scout who has never been bit by a mosquito. It's hard to understand what everybody is complaining about.

This is my concern. If BSA agrees to a BSA-only settlement, they will be funding the claimants' future lawsuits against the CO's. It would be the ultimate betrayal.

Very true. It's not just the volunteers. Many organizations have come to feel that it is "too much work" to have a youth-serving program.

Yes. It will be harder to have a youth-serving program. There will probably be fewer youth-serving programs as a result.

The most straightforward way to do this would be to just ask them.

True. CO's have learned that they are not covered by BSA insurance policies. Now they are learning that they won't be covered by a settlement, even if they agree to pay into it. BSA has not only thrown the CO's under the bus, they backed up the bus to run them over again.

Of course they did. Under YPT policies, a scouter is a scouter 24/7. Under the settlement, a scouter is only a scouter while he is volunteering at a scout event. Self-serving doubletalk... as usual.