Rick_in_CA

I wish that was the way it still was. True, no party has a monopoly on idiocy, and historically both parties were basically reasonable. But in recent times, things have changed. The Republican party has become the party of stupid and dishonesty. I am not saying that the Democrats are somehow saints or immune to dumb, they clearly are not. It's just that the recent Republican party has embraced ignorance, lies and crazy to an amazing level. There are still some Republicans that are trying to fight the good fight, but too many have embraced the dark side.

No you didn't, but it looked like you were responding to my reply to Scouter99's point: I apologize if I misunderstood your intent.

Sure you can criticize the CDC study (and many people on both sides of the spectrum do), but if you claim that the Bureau of Justice Statistics says the a woman's chance of getting raped in her lifetime is 0.6%, then that is flat out wrong. At best you are ignorant of the what the BJS says (they report that for a specific subgroup of woman, there is a 0.6% chance of getting raped in a single year - not in their lifetime. I am assuming the 0.06% was a typo and the poster meant 0.6%), or at worst are deliberately misrepresenting what the BJS is reporting.

An interesting article SSScout, thanks for sharing it. One section struck me: One of the parents in my cub pack told me something similar about why she doesn't let her son walk to and from school. A classmate of his used to walk, and someone called child services.

Yah, people like Michelle Bachmann and Donald Trump bug me almost as much as left leaning people like Jenny McCarthy and (insert Hollywood idiot of your choice here). Unfortunately, anti-vaccination hysteria crosses the political divide. Yah' date=' they bug me too. Especially when they got control of the DNC and got those anti-science planks into the party platform. Wait, that was the RNC, my bad. Plus it really bugs me about all those anti-science liberals that are getting elected to public office. Wait, I'm thinking of republicans again (Rick Perry, Todd Akin, the majority of congressional republicans). Which probably explains why there are so few republican scientists. You are reading the studies wrong. The recent study by the National Institutes of Justice' date=' the Department of Defense and the CDC reported that 18.3% of women in the US will be raped in their lifetime, while the .06% appears to be the rate of attacks in a given year for college age females that attend college. Since when is the Bureau of Justice Statistics liberal? Because it reports facts? Huh? Did you read the article you linked too? I don't see where it says anything about "feminists say facts don't matter" (but maybe I missed it). I'm not sure what you are referring too here (I'm not up on the latest in "gender studies"). But yes, there are a bunch of wackjobs on the left, but how many are taken seriously by the left leaning mainstream, and how many get elected to high office?

It might be out of your price range, but for something exotic how about doing some high adventure in Europe? There are several scout camps that cater to an international crowd. One I have read about is the Kandersteg International Scout Centre. It would not just be about doing HA, but about meeting scouts from around the world. More about the scout center: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandersteg_International_Scout_Centre.

I'm about five miles away. I think the farthest units in the district are about 15 miles from it.

What double standard? This private university was offering a call to prayer for it's some 700 Muslim students once a week (and they aren't canceling it, just moving it out of the bell tower). The Duke Chapel is an active Christian church that offers multiple Christian services every week, and there is Muslim prayer service in the basement every Friday. Where is the double standard? That there is any Muslim prayer at all on campus (that appears to be Franklin Graham's point)???

A lot depends on the school. There is a local public elementry school (it's almost accross the street from our CO) that we have tried to recruit from for years, but only recently have we gotten permission to do so. We were able to get an announcement in the school newsletter, flyers distributed to parents and to hold a recruitment meeting on campus.

Welcome!

So your justification for mocking Mohamed as a "Pedophile Prophet" is that others have done so too??? What was the point other than to show your complete contempt for the central figure in Islam? Way to live the Scout Law. Who says we have to stop saying Merry Christmas? The only thing I see is wingnuts going ballistic when people don't say "Merry Christmas". As for the rest - sigh, why am I bothering?

Free speech is meaningless unless it also applies to unpopular and objectionable speech. As for the "should we" question, that is harder. I agree that society is better off when we are polite and courteous to each other. I believe you should try to avoid offending people without good reason. However, sometimes speech that some find offensive is both appropriate and necessary. The trick is knowing the difference between "appropriate and necessary" and "just because I can". And the answer to that is not always obvious.

One idea I remember from my youth: back country trail maintenance. It's a backpacking trip combined with a service project. There are back country trails in parks, national forests and wilderness areas that are not accessible by road or day hike, but they still need maintenance. My troop did do some local trail maintenance when I was a scout, but not the overnight back country stuff. But several of our neighboring troops did it. It was a great way to give back to the parks we used so much. Unfortunately, I don't know if the NPS or BLM allow youth to do that anymore. In my day, my council summer camp used to use volunteer boy scout labor to do road maintenance (you got to ride in an old Army deuce and a half), but that stopped years ago.

From the original national presentation on Camp Cards (http://www.scouting.org/filestore/financeimpact/pdf/Camp_Card_Presentation-National_Meeting.pdf): So while National has finally figured this out, your Council is wrong and not paying attention (just like mine isn't either - they have no clue on this issue).

Lots of great advice already. Just adding my two cents. You don't have to do it all on your own. As others have said, see if you can get another pack to host you for their PWD and or B&G. Our pack has hosted a neighboring pack two years in a row for out PWD. They were small and didn't have their own track. We invited them to our derby, and we ran them as a separate group and they provided their own awards. Everyone had a blast. Talk to your DE about it. Do you have a Unit Commissioner? Ask your DE who it is if you don't know. They can often be a great source of advice (I know ours have been a great help). As others have said the District Round Table can often be a great source of advice starting out - just remember to ask questions when there. Another thing is to delegate. The CM shouldn't be doing everything. Get a parent to step up and be the PWD chair, another to be the Scout-O-Rama chair, a third to be the Blue and Gold chair, etc. Note, the chair doesn't have to do everything themselves either, they are just the one responsible for coordinating everyone. If you can't get a parent to step up to chair an event, punt and don't do that event. If you need six people to commit to helping run the Scout-O-Rama booth (if you are doing one), and you only get three, then punt. Learn to say NO. Having a handful of adults do everything is a great way to get a handful of burnt out leaders. And no one ever died because they didn't do a PWD. The B&G doesn't have to be a big thing either. It can be a simple potluck, or order pizza and watch a movie. As for training, most councils do a University of Scouting (sometimes called Pow-Wows) usually in January or February. That is usually a great opportunity to take classes on lots of subjects (how to run fun pack meetings, pack committee basics, outdoor games, etc.). If is also a great opportunity to meet follow scouters and find helpful resources (such as this from our local UoS: http://cubmaster101.com/). Also this forum is a great resource. Ask questions (like you are doing)!

Next there is the establishment and free exercise clauses of the first amendment (I put the clauses in bold): As for the phrase it self, you just have to look to what Thomas Jefferson wrote (you remember him? One of our founding fathers, wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom - one of the precursors to the first amendment?) in 1802 to a group of Baptists: This letter by Jefferson was sighted by the US Supreme Court in Reynolds v. United States 1879 (Wikipedia is your friend): Then you have James Madison (remember him? Generally considered the "Father of the Constitution"?), we have several of his writings (from a letter to Robert Walsh, March 2, 1819): or (from the detached memoranda, 1820): There are a lot more. These are the people that were THERE. They helped write the thing. So no, it isn't a concept that was "inferred later" to "negate the original document". This idea that the concept is foreign to the constitution is a revisionist, right-wing fantasy (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rick-santorum-separation-church-and-state-communist-idea-not-american-one).

But when a government entity allows the display (such as in a city hall or court house) of a religious document from one religion, but disallows the display of any similar documents from other religions, then that is a problem. It has nothing to do with tolerance and everything to do with that government entity favoring one religion over another. And many of those people that are pushing for government entities to display such things rarely have "tolerance" on their minds. Look at Roy Moore, the judge that put the huge stone monument to the ten commandments in the court house rotunda (and lost his seat when he refused to remove it). He doesn't believe that non-Christians are fit to serve in congress (http://www.wnd.com/2006/12/39271/), or that non-Christian prayers should be used to open the US Senate (http://www.wnd.com/2007/07/42613/). So his putting up the ten commandments was part of a campaign to establish Christianity as the de facto official religion of the United States (or in his mind to affirm that it already is). The same can be said of the prayer in school crowd. For the majority of them it's not about religious freedom, it's about putting non-Christians in their place (unless you define "religious freedom" as the freedom to make non-Christians second class citizens). So I strongly disagree with you. Objecting to the government displaying the ten commandments at a city hall is not about showing intolerance, it's about protecting the religious freedom that we enjoy in this great nation. Something that is under vigorous assault by elements of the religious right (the separation of church and state is a myth crowd).

The Declaration of Religious Principle is a problem, not just for this scout. If reads in full (the DRP statement on the application is titled: "Excerpt From Declaration of Religious Principle" - the full DRP can be found in the BSA bylaws - Article IX, Section 1): As you can see it disqualifies several religions off the bat, especially the line: "The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the best type of citizenship and are wholesome precepts in the education of the growing members". If you use a literal reading, only a monotheistic male God that is all powerful, and is active (giving favors and blessings) applies. So the Buddhist are out, so are most neo-pagans, deists, some Hindus, and others (I have been told by a Christian Protestant that first part of the line disqualifies him - but I admit I don't understand why). Even a more liberal reading still excludes Buddhist and some of the others. The rest of that line is also a problem: "...are necessary to the best type of citizenship...". You have to agree that anyone who is of one of the disqualifying faiths is unable to be "the best type of citizen". So Buddhists, Deists (which include some of our founding fathers) and others can't be good citizens? And doesn't that very idea contradict the whole "respects the beliefs of others" bit? So the BSA says Buddhist, Deists, etc. are fine, but the DRP clearly says they are not. Confused yet? The DRP was written by James West (with his YMCA background) about 100 years ago (when ideas of religious pluralism in the US were different then today - pluralism then was mostly about not excluding Jews, Catholics and Mormons) and has come down to us mostly unchanged. Someone once told me that the DRP was added to the bylaws sometime in the 1950s, but I have no idea if that is true (anyone know the answer to that?). So what are the actual requirements that we have to hold our potential eagle scout too? Since there are quite a few Buddhist eagle scouts out there, and the BSA (implicitly) says they can punt on half of the DRP, then how can we hold another scout to a stricter standard? I sure wouldn't require any scout or scouter to insist that it's impossible for Buddhists to be "the best type of" citizen.

Lots of good advice already, one thing I would add. How much do you really know about what happened? Do you have the whole story? What did you witness? Did you get your information from the scouts and scouters involved, or have you been getting details from others? How did your sources get their information? There is a reason hearsay is suspect. Before picking a course of action, you need to be sure you have the complete and real story or not (maybe you do, it isn't clear from your posts). And if you don't, that should color your choices (it isn't fair or trustworthy to lower the boom on someone when you know you don't have all the facts). I've been surprised at how often what "everyone knows" turns out to be incorrect. Good luck with a tough situation.