David CO

Yes, it may still apply. It would all depend on the nature and the severity of the offense.

I disagree. BSA can deny a persons membership application. It can also ban someone from BSA owned property. BSA cannot, however, dictate to the Chartered Organization who can/cannot have contact with the unit. That authority rests solely with the CO.

Sure we do. It's called the Pledge of Allegiance. We say it at every scout meeting.

I agree. We say the Lord's Prayer every week at mass. Is that redundant? Maybe so. But religion isn't supposed to be a "one and done" type of activity. It's a 24/7 thing.

Perhaps it is the just and timely wrath of God. Nine more plagues to go. Let my Boy Scouts free!

That would be great, if it were actually possible. Unfortunately, the employees are in control of BSA. The volunteers can't fire them. This is nothing new. The man who founded BSA got run out of the organization by the Chief Scout Executive. BSA has a long history of having powerful, highly-paid executives who can't be controlled by the volunteer members who supposedly employ them. BSA is a dictatorship, not a democracy.

When a parent asks if you have a problem with their son, what they really want to know is if they are going to have a problem with you.

You should be very careful about characterizing a scout in this way.

Having a well-run scout unit is (in itself) a service project benefiting the CO.

I think this is a bad idea. YP still applies to a JASM, just as it applies to all youth members. Inviting the JASM to interact with adult scouters in this way might cause an adult to temporarily forget that the JASM is still a youth member. Scouting is already a risky business for adults. No reason to make it worse.

JASM is not an adult.

Yes. Joining scouting can be a bit like reading all of the warnings and disclaimers on a medicine package. Knowing all the possible side-effects of a medicine can really discourage a person from taking it.

No, no, no. I didn't mean to suggest that you change religions. I was suggesting that you might like to participate in your own church's scout unit.

I think the Brits have that already. It's called Rover Scouts.

Try it, you'll like it.

Not at all. BSA fully understood, when it created these policies, that they could not and would not be followed. Any resulting dishonor is on them, not on you.

BSA first offered its program to Chartered Organizations with a clear understanding that the scouts and scouters would very likely have a pre-existing relationship with the CO, and with each other, that both precedes and supersedes the scouting relationship. If this now causes them some liability concerns, that's just too bad. We are not going to sacrifice the relationships we have with our church, with our school, and with each other just to placate some paper-pushing execs in BSA. Not going to happen.

Jeff Foxworthy was in your unit?

BSA got in the middle of that because it once believed in that.

The burro is indigenous to the Iberian Peninsula, which includes Spain and Portugal. It doesn't seem (to me) to be at all racist to give the burro character a Spanish/Portuguese name. Nobody seems to complain that the Lion King characters have African names.

A slippery slope that even a sure-footed mail carrying burro like Pedro would have trouble with.

I called it a fictional religion. I never implied that it is real. In the context of the movie, they referred to it as a religion in the first film. So I used that for the lack of a better word.

No, we don't all say this. I would prefer that my family/students/scouts be faithful and true to our religion, rather than pursue happiness on Earth, even if that requires some sacrifices on their part.

Just a short time ago, I couldn't have imagined that we would be having a discussion in which scouters were arguing that homosexual conduct is morally straight. Yet here we are.

When I was growing up, we had several TV shows that dealt with children growing up with one parent. On Spin and Marty and Lassie, the fathers had died in WWII. On Julia, the father had died in Viet Nam. On Bonanza, High Chaparral, Andy Griffith Show, and My Three Sons, it was the mothers who had died (from various causes). They didn't present single parenthood as an ideal situation, it was just a fact of life. These things happen.