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.

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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.

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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