Boy scouts to accept gays?

News reports are emerging that the Boy Scouts are seriously considering lifting the ban on gay members and scout leaders and that the decision might come very soon.

The Boy Scouts of America, one of the nation’s largest private youth organizations, is actively considering an end to its decades-long policy of banning gay scouts or scout leaders, according to scouting officials and outsiders familiar with internal discussions.
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The new policy, now under discussion, would eliminate the ban from the national organization’s rules, leaving local sponsoring organizations free to decide for themselves whether to admit gay scouts.
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The discussion of a potential change in policy is nearing its final stages, according to outside scouting supporters. If approved, the change could be announced as early as next week, after the BSA’s national board holds a regularly scheduled meeting.

This reversal, coming just seven months after the national body affirmed its ban on gay members, demonstrates the remarkable rapidity with which acceptance of equal rights for the LGBT community is advancing. The Boy Scouts have been getting a public relations hammering and losing donors because of their reactionary stand of excluding gays and seem to have realized that any group that depends on membership of young people cannot have such a policy and survive because young people are way ahead of the old guard in acceptance of diversity.

As I wrote earlier, it is usually the case that in such reversals by large organizations, they usually edge slowly towards doing the right thing by taking incremental steps. The Boy Scout policy change, if confirmed, will not positively welcome gays into the group but simply drops the national banning policy, allowing local troops to make their own decisions. So in the short term one could expect some affiliates to accept gays and others not.

But such minimal steps tend to create their own problems. For example, what happens to a gay scout whose family moves from an area with an accepting troop to one that bans them? What would happen if a gay scout leader rises in the hierarchy to a position overseeing a local affiliate that excludes gays? The proposed change, while it is to be welcomed, will cause all manner of internal contradictions.

It is only a matter of time (I give it five years at the most) before the national group shifts to a more affirmative position, requiring that all affiliates not exclude gays.

TV Review: The Untouchables

Last night I watched the Frontline documentary The Untouchables that I wrote about yesterday that explored the question of why, more than four years after the financial debacle involving widespread mortgage fraud, not a single high-level Wall Street executive has faced criminal prosecution. All that has happened is a bunch of very low-level people being charged and a series of civil prosecutions resulting in plea bargains in which some banks have paid fines that seem large but are puny compared to the scale of the fraud, and which the bank executives can simply write off as the cost of doing business while they continue to enrich themselves with high salaries and bonuses. The program covers some of the same ground as that excellent 2010 documentary Inside Job that I reviewed here [Read more…]

More on the unequal justice system

I have been highlighting the unequal treatment meted out by the Obama administration’s justice department, where extremely harsh treatment is given to low-level criminals and whistleblowers and hackers while those who commit massive damage to the financial system that cause immense hardship t many, and even acknowledge major wrongdoing, are given slaps on the wrist. It is telling that as yet, not a single high-level official in the financial sector has gone to jail, or even faced the threat of jail, for their actions. [Read more…]

Beware of ‘public spirited’ corporate shills

The so-called ‘debt crisis’ has spawned a lot of groups ostensibly for the purpose of suggesting ways to reduce it. But as this news report suggests, the members of one such group known as ‘Fix the Debt’ may not be as disinterested as they claim to be, because they simultaneously serve other businesses that are directly affected by the measures they propose. [Read more…]

The GOP’s slavish devotion to the rich

One has to hand it to the Democrats. They have been fairly successful in masking their allegiance to the oligarchy. The GOP is far more open about whose interests they really care about. As the fiscal cliff Kabuki theater played itself out towards the end of the year. I did not follow the details of the maneuvering that led up to the final agreement but was intrigued by the suggestion put forward by speaker John Boehner of something known as ‘Plan B’ as a stop-gap measure. This came and went fairly quickly and so did receive much scrutiny but its details show the priorities of the GOP. [Read more…]