Culture,  News

What about openly homosexual Boy Scout leaders?

Gallup recently conducted a poll of American attitudes about homosexual rights. In keeping with recent trends, a majority of Americans (53%) say that they favor same-sex marriage. A majority also favors inheritance rights, health benefits for partners, and adoption rights for gays and lesbians.

There is one little item in this poll that caught my eye. While 63% of Americans say that discrimination against gay people is a problem in our country, a majority of Americans (52%) say that openly gay adults should not be allowed to serve as Boy Scout Leaders. This begs the obvious question. If Americans believe that discrimination against gays is a problem, why do they favor discrimination when it comes to Boy Scout leaders? Is there something in their gut putting a check on their otherwise clear opposition to discrimination?

My hunch is that many Americans have not fully thought through their laissez faire attitude toward gay rights. Many Americans seem to believe that people ought to be able to do what they want to do within the privacy of their own bedrooms so long as they aren’t hurting anyone. They see the matter as a private issue and have not fully contemplated the public consequences of the next stage of the sexual revolution. Thus when issues like Boy Scout leadership come up, we find a discrepancy between what Americans say they believe and what they are actually willing to do.

Here’s the bottom line. Our “private” views on sexual morality are not really private. They both reflect and shape the culture that we live in. And they inevitably have public consequences. The Boy Scout controversy is just a small piece of it. I suspect that Americans haven’t even begun to comprehend the enormity of the revolution that they are now embarking on with reference to the normalization of homosexuality and gay marriage. It will become clear soon enough.

(HT: Tony Perkins)

5 Comments

  • David Thomas

    You put your finger on it exactly, Denny. The exploitation of a loophole in our cultural understanding of the private nature of sexuality has led to this gaffe, and the country and its culture is doomed as a result.

    The simple fact is that while the sexual act itself is “private,” the institution of marriage and the concomitant /practice/ of sexuality is anything but private. The gay lobby has successfully exploited the natural squeamishness that people have regarding individual sexual privacy (which is related to intimacy) to plaster over the (rather obvious, in my opinion) principle that marriage/sexuality and its practice has been one of the most openly addressed and controlled aspects of human culture for millenia. Why? Because the both the direction and the future existence of the each culture and the race on a whole depends directly and immediately upon it. In short, we’d be fools not to address and regulate what we expect and allow sexually within our cultural boundaries.

    I am reminded of the famous Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait), painted by northern renaissance master Jan van Eyck. The “key” to unlock this highly symbolic painting is not only in the various items in the room (dog=fidelity, oranges=fertility, unclad feet=holiness, and so forth), but the convex mirror on the back wall. In it, Van Eyck has painbstakingly painted HIMSELF and others (i.e., as reflections), who serve as witnesses to the wedding. The whole depicts a convention of the time, viz., people wedding in their bedrooms with witnesses present, as a testimony to the sacred nature of the marriage act. While the witnesses obviously exited before the act of consummation, the idea was that while the sexual act itself was private, the institution and sexuality in general was not (the same is still symbolized by the statement in most weddings, ”
    You may kiss the bride”–the very /point/ of that act is that those present witness the act and approve of it; paradoxically, for the couple to insist that it be “saved” for the wedding chambers alone would violate this crucial cultural principle).

    Paradoxically, by insisting on a “privacy” which heretofore has not really existed, we’ve opened Pandora’s Box of abnominations that are now being loosed on our hapless culture. As you note, we’ll find out soon enough that the attitude of, “I find that revolting, but to each his own,” won’t work, and in fact, will be deadly to us and our posterity.

  • dr. james willingham

    One of the reasons for my earning a Master’s in counseling from Liberty’s school of life long learning, being in the first class to graduate in Jan.1988, was due to the terrible problems encountered in the lives of people who had been abused in incest and pedophilia situations. There is no question in my mind from my studies and experiences in this area of pathology that the impact on children, regardless of age, is devastating, to say the least, interrupting as it does the age/stage developments and diverting the child into a morass of of shame, feelings of inferiority, and other traumas. I predict that, based on the knowledge gained from my readings, counseling experiences, and etc., that we are going to see, if the sodomy issue wins public acceptance, generations of dysfunctional families and children on a scale that will stagger the imagination of scholars in many fields of science.

  • Nathan Cesal

    Denny, I think you are showing your prejudice against gays again. What do you think the results would be if the survey question was, “Do you think that men should be girl scout leaders?”

      • Nathan Cesal

        I’d assume a survey would show nearly 100% of Americans in favor of allowing traditional marriage and we’ll assume a more definitive apprehension of letting men be girl scout leaders. So, when issues like Girl Scout leadership come up, we find a discrepancy between what Americans say they believe and what they are actually willing to do — even more so than with gay marriage.

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