On my honor
Reflections on the war between the Boy Scouts and the Unitarian Universalists
-- by someone with a foot in both camps
Personally by Dan Kennedy
There's always been something a little weird and more than a little
anachronistic about the Boy Scouts. Certainly their gung-ho patriotism, of the
Southern-fried conservative militaristic variety, is out of place in the
detached, ironic '90s. But it was out of place in the '60s and '70s, too, when
politically aware adolescents had to reconcile the red-white-and-blue
propaganda they got at their local Scout hall with Vietnam and Watergate.
Apparently it was out of place even during the somnolent '50s, according to the
gay essayist and author Richard Rodriguez, who was a Scout then. "Truth is, in
a country that romanticizes Huck Finn and Beavis and Butt-head, there was and
remains something vaguely un-American about the Boy Scouts," Rodriguez wrote in
a recent commentary for Pacific News Service. "The stress on regimentation, the
fascist brown uniforms -- there was something a little odd about the whole
enterprise. And we knew it."
But as anachronistic as Scouting may have been, it always seemed a harmless
enough enterprise. It was a way for teenage boys to channel their out-of-control
energy into something constructive and useful. To learn about teamwork
and community and helping others. To stick with something you liked and
believed to be important, even though others derided you as a geek or worse --
perhaps the most valuable lesson of all.
Scouting has never really been the cultural icon of red-blooded, all-American
boyhood that it is often depicted to be. Rather, it has always been a way for
kids who didn't quite fit in with the sports crowd and the social cliques to
find other ways to make a mark. It was, and is, a valuable outlet for boys who
aren't much good at sports and are awkward with their peers and would just as
soon stay in the house and play video games all day. And it certainly didn't
matter if some of the boys secretly thought about boys rather than girls, or if
a few didn't accept the image of God as some sort of Hairy Thunderer who
demanded obedience, service, and fear.
Now, though, the adults who run the Boy Scouts of America are destroying the
organization. By attempting to enforce a rigid, orthodox moral code that is
entirely out of touch with the mainstream, Scouting is transforming itself into
a bastion of sexual and religious intolerance. In a culture war that most of us
had assumed was over, or was at least dying down, the Boy Scouts of America
have aligned themselves with the losers: Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Trent
Lott, Phyllis Schlafly, and all the other hatemongers whose views have been
heard, and rejected, by a vast majority of the public.
In the latest and most disturbing development so far, the Boy Scouts have gone
to war with a mainstream religious organization. Last week, it was reported
that the Boy Scouts have ordered the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)
to stop giving its "Religion in Life" award to UU Scouts unless the association
drops its criticism of Scouting's antigay policies. That's bad enough. But
what's not so widely known is that the Scout leadership also demanded that the
UUA -- the spiritual descendants of free thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau -- remove from its "Religion in Life" manual a
reference to the "trouble" that some UU Scouts may have with Scouting's "duty
to God" requirement.
Thus do the Boy Scouts of America demand theological correctness of people who
became Unitarian Universalists precisely because they believe there is no such
thing as theological correctness. The Reverend John Buehrens, president of the
UUA, in a letter to the Boy Scouts, called the demands "blatant discrimination
against children on the basis of their religion." And he is exactly right.
Which leaves people like me feeling monumentally conflicted. I was a Scout --
and not just a Scout, but an Eagle Scout. My seven-year-old son is a Cub Scout,
and I'd like to see him follow in my path. But I'm also a Unitarian
Universalist. And I'm beginning to wonder whether it's possible to be both.
This is not the first time I've had occasion to think about the incompatibility
between my conscience and the dictates of Scouting. In the early 1970s, shortly
after I'd left the Episcopal church, my friend Brad, a Unitarian, and I wrote a
letter to the Boy Scouts of America. I don't remember exactly what we wrote,
but it was something to the effect that we were Scouts, we were agnostics, and
what the hell were they going to do about it?
We never got a response. Perhaps the BSA felt more secure in its position back
then. Perhaps the notion of two kids' declaring their agnosticism was simply
too exotic to worry about. In any case, Brad and I -- and several other kids in
our troop -- all managed to earn the coveted Eagle, even though I did it while
omitting the phrase "under God" every time we gathered to say the Pledge of
Allegiance.
Gay rights, though, was another matter entirely. Twenty-five to 30 years ago,
the idea that lesbians and gay men were as deserving of equal treatment as
anyone else was completely foreign, certainly in a small town in southeastern
Massachusetts. It was a time when the Scouting movement didn't have to
articulate its homophobia -- it was simply understood, accepted, and approved
of, as it was in most of society. (Never mind that the Scouting movement was
founded at the turn of the century by Lord Robert Baden-Powell, widely regarded
as a repressed homosexual and a Nazi sympathizer.)
Certainly the Boy Scouts' homophobia was not something my fellow Scouts and I
questioned. One of the reasons Scouting appealed to us was that it helped take
our minds off our singular lack of success on the dating scene. We were already
striking out with girls; to compound that by being anything less than
virulently homophobic would have been akin to branding ourselves as fags,
which, as I recall, was the most popular antigay epithet of the era.
Besides, we told ourselves, we'd seen the dangers of mixing Scouts and, well,
fags. One of the older Scouts and a
twentyish assistant scoutmaster were both widely believed to be gay. Both left
the troop after being caught with underage Scouts in sexually charged
situations that fell short of physical contact but were clearly inappropriate.
Good riddance, we said, and even today I think it was right for them to go.
What I'm sure never occurred to anyone at the time was how difficult it must
have been for young gay men, in small-town 1970s America, to find acceptable
outlets for their sexuality.
My memories of Scouting, though, involve not mainly religious defiance and
sophomoric homophobia, but rather a series of transformative experiences. Our
troop was headed by men with a great love for the outdoors, who took us hiking
and camping in the White Mountains and along the Appalachian Trail in the
Berkshires and Vermont. At 12, I found myself stumbling through the
clouds along an icy trail leading to the summit of Mount Washington. At 15 and
16, I helped lead younger kids on five-day, 50-mile backpacking trips.
The men who introduced us to these experiences were deeply conservative, but
they weren't big on uniforms, drills, and slogans, none of which would have
gone over with Brad, me, or the rest of our friends anyway. But in leading by
example, they had a profound effect on me, having grown up in a decidedly
nonathletic family that viewed the outdoors as something to be seen through the
car window. Hiking remains an important part of my life, and it's something I
very much want for my son.
It may also be something I have to teach him myself.
Like many baby boomers, my wife and I went searching for a spiritual home
several years after our children were born. We chose a Unitarian Universalist
church because it was something she, an ex-Catholic, and I -- no longer an
agnostic, but not really anything else, either -- could be comfortable with.
Unitarian Universalism prescribes no set of beliefs; although its origins are
Christian, today about only 10 percent of UUs identify themselves as such.
Rather, it is a spiritual community, and each of its members must seek her or
his own path.
For some UUs, that path is agnosticism or atheism. There are even some UU
ministers who declare themselves to be atheists. Thus, as John Buehrens
suggests, it is at least theoretically possible for a Scout who is a good
Unitarian Universalist not just to be denied the right to earn a religion
award, but to be thrown out of the Boy Scouts for his religious beliefs. Not
too long ago I asked my son about his belief in God. He replied that God is
within us and all around us -- a splendid answer, Emerson's impenetrable
philosophy rephrased with childlike simplicity. I'm not sure, though, that it
would be good enough for Lawrence Ray Smith, PhD, chairman of the Religious
Relationship Committee of the Boy Scouts of America and the author of the
letter ordering the UUA to stop giving religious awards to Scouts.
My son has barely begun in Scouts. He has just completed a year as a Tiger
Cub, and this fall he'll become a Cub Scout. The men and women who run his Cub
Scout pack seem like good and decent people, and I doubt that any of them would
endorse the intolerance espoused in Dallas, where the Boy Scouts of America's
headquarters is based. But at the same time, I'm worried about his hearing
messages from authority figures that conflict with our values. When a lesbian
couple in our church had a baby last spring, he saw everyone oohing and aahing
just as much as they would had the baby been born to a husband and wife. That's
a message the Scouts have no right to contradict.
A few years ago, Brad and I were hiking through an early-November snow in the
Pemigewasset Wilderness. The temperature had unexpectedly dropped into the
single digits the night before; my backpacking stove wouldn't light, and we
ended up eating granola bars and diving into our sleeping bags in what proved
to be only a semisuccessful attempt to stay warm. It was, in other words,
exactly the kind of experience our years as Boy Scouts had prepared us for.
Both our sons were too young for Scouts at the time. But we talked about
whether it was even possible for them to have the same kind of experience we'd
had -- or whether homophobia and religious intolerance had turned Scouting into
something to stay away from.
I tried to call Brad earlier this week but couldn't reach him. So I'm not sure
what he'd decided. As for me, I'm not looking to be either a protester or a
blind follower. We'll muddle along -- for now. I don't want to hurt my son by
pulling him out of the group. But the Boy Scouts would be wrong to interpret my
reluctance to take a stand as a sign that I support their discriminatory
policies. And I know I'm not alone.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com