NJCubScouter

I agree with TwoCubDad. Of all the issues that need to be resolved in the BSA, this isn't really one of them. Plus, is there ANY area where the BSA succeeds in maintaining 100 percent consistency? After years of reading these forums, I doubt it. Even when something seems absolutely clear, there always seems to be some stray booklet, magazine article, press release, photo or something that contradicts what has been published or issued elsewhere. So, most of the time silver is "higher" than gold, but not all the time. I think we can live with it.

One major issue that I am having right now is that when I am at the "main forum page", clicking on certain forums just takes me right back to the same page, and not to the forum itself. For example, I just tested it, and clicking on "Open Discussion" or "Advancement Resources" takes me where I want to go and lists the topics in that forum, but clicking on "Issues and Politics" or "Scouter Announcements" does not take me anywhere. I am still able to click on the topic listed under "Last Post" on the right, but I cannot get to any of the other topics. "Issues and Politics" was working for me yesterday, but not today. There may still be other problems that I am having, but until I can actually get into all the forums, I am not even sure what other issues remain. (By the way, before anyone asks, I was logged in when clicking on the different forums mentioned above.)

Wow, with the old software the moderators only got an asterisk. So here I am a brand new moderator and I don't even have the key to the secret clubhouse yet, and already I'm "Super." Well, I'll just have to try to do a "super" job. (Actually, I think the forum is best off when the moderators need to do as little as possible.)

Jrush: Who, or what, are "the izzies"?

Keep in mind this is another 12-year-old thread that appeared at or near the top of the list due to the forum software change. I had never heard of that publication before and suspect it has not been widely available for years.

Tap, tap. Is this thing on?

Oh boy. And who do you think the "unseen power" might be?

I really hope they don't think they are going to get any valid results from their "survey." They are going to get a self-selected group, and the percentage of Scouters who actually know the "survey" is taking place is probably very, very small. They are also likely to get a higher percentage of people who are upset about the proposed change. And, what exactly is the question (or questions) in the survey?

Woapalanne, I think you and Terry may be defining "good character" a bit differently.

On the issue of openly gay Scouts, as opposed to openly gay leaders, the BSA has said very little over the years, and what they have said has often been vague. I remember one statement (probably almost 10 years ago) that if a Scout revealed that he was gay, the leaders should speak with him to see if he really meant it (not the words the BSA used), and if he did, he was out. As opposed to say, James Dale (an adult leader, though only about 19 at the time, I believe), who got a termination letter with no conversation beforehand. I have tried several times over the years to find that statement about gay Scouts on the Internet again, and it seems to have mysteriously disappeared, but I know I read it. I also remember reading some convoluted statement on BSALegal.org about how the prohibition on openly gay "leaders" must also apply to Scouts because, as a Scout progresses through the ranks, he is required to hold at least one "leadership" position. If that doesn't seem to make sense, that's because it doesn't make sense, and it's not accurate, either. I think what they really wanted to say was that an openly gay person cannot be a Scout or a leader, but they didn't want to come right out and say it where the youth are concerned. So the question of whether, under the current policy, a unit could terminate the membership of a Scout for being openly gay, is a little murky. To the extent that the unit can do so, I think we can assume that if "local option" is adopted for leaders, it will apply to Scouts as well.

bnelon, isn't that phone number at the BSA office? A Google search says it is the number of the "National Service Desk" at BSA. Or is it really a "call center" somewhere?

As I have said before, I think we can rely on the wisdom of local unit leaders to decide what the tenting arrangements should be for their unit (in addition to following the YP guidelines, of course.) I have no doubt that they will come up with answers suitable to each situation.

It is very difficult to reconcile the two major perspectives involved here. There are those who believe God has decreed that homosexuality is a sin and that someone who is openly gay is a person of poor character who should not be in a position of leading youth. (At least, that is how I have always understood the main justification for the BSA's current policy.) And there are others (including me) who don't believe that, but who instead believe that it is wrong to discriminate against people simply because they are openly gay. Some of the latter group (including me) believe that such discrimination goes against the true values of the BSA. There may be other beliefs on the spectrum that don't line up completely with these descriptions, but I think these are the the main perspectives. The position of the BSA national leadership, up until now, has been that they will accommodate only the first of these perspectives. Now they may be in the process of deciding that both perspectives have a place in the BSA, and the only way to accomplish that is to leave the leadership decisions to the local level, which is where 99 percent of those decisions were being made already. I think this would be the correct decision. If that causes some people to leave the BSA because they believe the BSA is "endorsing" conduct that they find sinful, or for any other reason, I'm sorry about that, but it doesn't change the fact that I believe the policy should be changed to "local option." As for money influencing the decision... well, there are those of us who believe that money had some role in keeping the current policy in place. For me, the motivations of the BSA leadership in making this change (if they actually do make it) are secondary. I would prefer that they do the right thing for the right reasons, but if they do the right thing for partially-wrong reasons, at least that's better than doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. "Right" and "wrong" being, of course, matters of perspective.

MattR's comment got me thinking about how this might play out in my unit. I think the thing to remember is that matters of "membership policy" are not really up to the parents or uniformed leaders or even the troop committee. They are up to the chartered organization. In my case, the CO is a church but it is not a church that has (as far as I know) taken a clear nationwide position on the subject. It also is my understanding (though I am not a member of the church and not an expert on how it is governed) that decisions are made on a congregational level and that there is no hierarchy that would be dictating the church's decision. I have a guess as to what the church would say it wants to policy to be, but that is based on some conversations that have been reported to me second-hand from around the time of the Dale decision, while my son was still a Cub Scout, so I was not yet involved in the troop. So it's not really much to go on. I'm also not sure how the BSA intends to deal with the CO's on this issue, assuming the change is made. To my knowledge, this policy has never been the subject of any direct communications between the council/district and the church, and I don't know whether there is any plan to do so now. So, who approaches who about this? As a troop committee member, I don't really see the need to initiate anything. Also, keep in mind that in order for the issue to even come up, someone has to apply for a leadership position WHO WOULD OTHERWISE BE ACCEPTABLE AS A LEADER, and who also happens to be openly gay. If the person would not otherwise be acceptable as a leader, it doesn't even become an issue. Most of our new leaders are parents of Scouts in the troop, so other people know them, are their neighbors, have worked with them in Cub Scouts and/or sports teams or whatever, so it's not a matter of someone appearing on our doorstep who nobody knows, and saying "I want to be a leader" and maybe now adding "and by the way I am openly gay." (My general attitude about someone showing up out of the blue generally goes back to something I remember from the old YP training video, if a potential new leader seems too good to be true, they probably are.) Of course it is possible that one of the parents might "come out" as gay, and I know this does happen sometimes, but I've never seen it and I don't think it happens very often. The other possibility is a Scout who ages out of the troop and becomes an Assistant Scoutmaster. In the case of James Dale, after turning 18 he went to college, but I believe he still lived at home (or if he was living at school, it was within a half-hour or so of home), so either way he was still involved in the troop. While at college, he "came out", he spoke at a seminar that was covered in the newspaper, and the rest is history. So this is probably the most likely way for the issue to come up, but I am not aware of any of the past or present ASM's in our troop being gay. Of course, if they didn't tell anybody, I wouldn't know. I generally don't figure those sorts of things out on my own. If it did happen, I suppose we would have to ask the CO, unless the CO told us what their policy was a ahead of time. So I guess what I am saying to MattR, or anybody else, it's not really something that needs to be debated among the parents. It's up to the CO. Of course, if your CO is completely "in name only" and signs whatever they are asked to sign, and asks no questions, and cannot be persuaded to take more of an active role, I am not sure what you would do then. My son's old pack is chartered to a parent-teacher organization that is basically "in name only", with the twist that there is almost always an overlap between the executive board of the CO and the parents in the pack, and usually some of the leaders as well. So in that case, in some sense it actually will be up to the parents, or some of them. It's probably going to play out a little differently with each CO, except for those who simply say "No" as soon as national announces the change in policy.

I'm not even sure what the proposal is. I guess I have gotten so tired of these immigration proposals being made and then going nowhere, I am reluctant to spend the few minutes' effort to find out what this one's really about. I also figure that anything that is the result of a bipartisan proposal in the Senate and a separate proposal by President Obama is probably dead-on-arrival in the House. Or have I, in my state of not-paying-attention, missed something?

I noticed the quick pileup of pages too, Eamonn. But when you consider the number of total pages that have been expended on this issue in this forum over the past 15 years or so (hundreds of pages?), when the policy is suddenly (apparently) about to be reversed, a lot of comments are to be expected. Not to mention that someone threw the issue of atheists into the mix; that one's always a crowd-pleaser as well.

I guess I have written a lot about this issue in this forum over the past 11 years (give or take a couple of weeks) but I don't have very much time to write about it now, so I'll just say this: When I started reading this thread I was firmly in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp, but the fact that it is actually on the official BSA web site (http://www.scouting.org/MembershipPolicy.aspx) means that, at the very least, the BSA really leadership is "discussing" the change. Of course, saying it is being "discussed" technically leaves them an "out" to say "Ok, we discussed it, but we decided to leave the policy as is." Technically, but not in real life. It would be a public relations disaster -- which is not to downplay the BSA's ability to create public relations problems for itself, as they have in the past, but this would be a new low. So I doubt they would have said they are considering it unless it was pretty much a done deal. Which most likely also means that they have gotten the representatives of the major CO's that had been opposing this to at least acknowledge that they won't turn in their charters en masse. That is not to say that some units won't fold or move to different CO, and it is not to say that some parents and leaders won't abandon the program entirely. It is clear from this thread and one of the others on this subject (the one that started under Open Discussion) that there are people who will not be content with the fact that their own unit can continue to enforce its own standards for leadership, but wish to determine the standards for other units as well. Hopefully these folks will end up deciding that the benefits of the program and the resources of the BSA outweigh their disappointment with the fact that there is local option -- just as I, for example, decided to remain part of the BSA despite my disappointment in their failure to allow local option. Without responding to specific posts, I think some people need to relax and see what happens. (Of course, that's just a suggestion; if you want to run around yelling and screaming and quitting and whatever over this, that's your local option too, I guess.) It does appear that, for now, the policy requiring belief in a higher power will not change. But keep in mind that six months ago, the BSA announced that after a two-year study, and after determining that the BSA's membership supported the current policy, they were retaining the current policy. Up until I started reading this thread yesterday, I still thought it would take 15 to 20 years for the BSA to adopt local option. Now it appears likely that within two weeks or so, the policy will be changed to local option. So hopefully once the "gay issue" has been put to rest, something can be done about the religion issue as well.

Your concerns are reasonable ones, but I have been hearing the same overall question - Is Scouting Becoming Irrelevant? - for at least the last 40 years. It was the impetus for the much-maligned "improved Scouting program" of the early 70s and many other changes since then. And yet the BSA is still here, not with the same membership numbers, but it is still here. On one specific point, Scoutcraft skills may be viewed as irrelevant by some, but not by the Scouts and leaders in "my" troop, and from my perspective, that's what counts the most.

Shouldn't this thread be moved to "Issues and Politics"? I know there are already at least three threads on this there (one of which was closed), but I think we can live with having several threads on this important topic, for the time being. It should be in its "designated area", though. (This message has been edited by a staff member.)

Very well said Terry, in both your post and your excellent article. And, as always, thank you for providing this open forum for us.

I am pleased to see that in the Second Class fire-building requirement, it is once again required to actually light the fire (with an exception, "unless prohibited by local fire restrictions.) And, after the fire has been started, they have added this: "After allowing the flames to burn safely for at least two minutes, safely extinguish the flames with minimal impact to the fire site." I still would rather see changes to the requirements made less often, and only when it's really necessary, unless a new handbook is coming out. But if they have to make annual changes, this one seems pretty good, and I suppose it could be argued that it is "really necessary." The Scouts should definitely be able to build a fire in such a way that it's not going to go out immediately (the new "two-minute rule"), to light the fire, to safely put it out, and to leave as little impact as possible.

I generally agree with what some others have said. You need to have a number of pieces in place before you actually have a troop -- a chartered organization, your first prospective Scouts (people are saying five, although I thought I had read somewhere that this had been increased), a Scoutmaster, three members for a troop committee (including the chair) -- and then the charter itself. You should probably call your District Executive to help you through the process, and I believe there are BSA publications on starting new units as well. And once you're ready, you can start having meetings and activities. I do not think there is an ideal time of year. The timing will be influenced by how you recruit your first group of Scouts. If you are depending entirely on new crossovers from the pack(s), your meetings are probably going to start after they cross over. However, if you have recruited enough "older" Scouts (whether from existing troops or boys who are 11 or older but not yet Scouts), there is no point in waiting.

Trevorum: I've been speculating on 20 years, but five would be better.

The impression I have gotten from some threads in this forum, and from things I have heard "around town", is that many of the council and district-level advancement people focus mainly on making sure the "objective" requirements, namely the merit badges and project, have been completed, and are not that interested in "interpreting" whether the "active", POR and Scout spirit requirements have truly been satisfied. Based on the current Guide to Advancement, National is probably fostering this attitude. Meanwhile, many people in the units would like to make sure ALL the requirements have been met. The result is that when an appeal is taken, or there is a BOR "under disputed circumstances", if the merit badges are there and the completed project workbook is there, the Scout is probably going to be awarded Eagle. I would prefer to see the Scouts meet ALL the requirements, but this is seems to be the reality.

Ok, so this person's candidate didn't win, and he's not happy about it. I get it. I haven't always been happy with the results of elections either, especially in the county and town where I live, where one party wins every election, and guess what, it isn't the party I usually vote for. As for presidential elections, I just calculated that this election brought me back up to .500 in my voting-for-winning-presidential-candidates average. (That's counting Bush as the winner in 2000, which... nah, let's not "go there", as people say these days.) So is the cup half full, or half empty? I don't know. But I do know that the world is not ending, the nation is not collapsing, etc. just because this guy's candidate did not win an election. President Obama won because that's who more people preferred. Why they did so is a matter of individual choice. And by the way, I do wish this rabbi would leave his (and my) fellow Jewish people out of this. I don't need to be told who to vote for by him or anybody else.