Be prepared, be very prepared...
The city gets scary again with the Scouts
Be prepared, be very prepared...
And so, the saga of the Boy Scouts continues.
The City of Brotherly Love, not content with a federal court decision ordering it to leave the kerchief-wearing, square knot-tying tykes alone, is back in court.
As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock will recall, the city has been trying to evict the Cradle of Liberty Chapter of the Boy Scouts for a number of years, after failing to ‘convince’ them to drop a national policy that precludes openly gay members. The city has been stymied at every legal turn, losing at both the state and federal levels. But they’re not finished yet.
As a Christmas (or Hannukah, or Kwanzaa) gift to its gay and gay-friendly movers and shakers, the Nutter administration has decided to appeal the unfavorable decision to the Third Circuit, thereby dragging out (um, no pun intended) this sorry tale of ornery adults and needy children.
Because that is really what is happening here. The city and the LGBT community can claim that it’s fighting on behalf of the little guys, the disenfranchised sexual minorities who shouldn’t have to sit by while the Big Bad Boy Scouts do such horribly discriminatory things as sponsor summer camps, enrichment courses, and mentoring programs for kids who don’t have to announce their sexual orientation (assuming they even know what it is) to the world.
They do these terrible things on public property, even though the organization has built and maintained that property for almost a century. They perpetrate these human rights violations in the light of day, forcing these kids to leave the mean streets of the inner city and actually escape the shootings and the drugs and the premature deaths.
How dare they, these monsters! How dare they do this, even though the Supreme Court of the United States say they can!
It’s always struck me as hypocritical the way the well-placed lawyers and deep-pocketed gay activists have wept bitter tears over the poor disenfranchised gay kids (the ones who think it’s absolutely necessary to announce their sexual preferences before toasting those marshmallows) but have done little to nothing for the African-American kid who comes from a single-family home and whose only contact with a stable male authority figure comes from his membership in the Scouts.
And guess what? Some of these boys may very well be gay. But that’s irrelevant to their sense of self-worth when all that matters to a troubled boy is that he be fed, be respected, be taken seriously and be viewed as someone with potential.
Rhetoric aside, the only reason that these activists feel justified in forcing the Cradle of Liberty to violate its First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly and expression is that they think they have public opinion behind them. And in the rarified circles in which they travel, perhaps they do.
But if you ask the kids, and the single parents, and the grandmothers and teachers who deal with these forgotten and at-risk children, you’ll hear another story. One of gratitude. One of hope.
One that reflects the reality of human dignity far better than any slogan cobbled together by well-heeled activists and a sycophantic City Hall.
Carl - you first- then Less:
The SCOTUS is only concerned with what is constitutionally legal, not what is moral, of course.
And of course, one can argue that the law as read by the SCOTUS can be immoral. The two points can exist simultaneously. Legal but immoral. Abortion legal but immoral.
Miss Flowers argues that the discrimination that is legally part of the institutional BSA does not in fact morally affect the local chapter which is in the process of saving young boys from real issues not made up ones.
Look, as a Catholic, I know that my church discriminates against non-Catholics who are not allowed to receive our sacraments. And since the church pays no taxes, that discrimination is indirectly subsidized by the taxpayers.
The taxpayers of— Gendres- ....Philadelphia do not support the BSA just because it is city owned land. The scouts maintain the property without any help. The tax exemption for the BSA is the same as for my church.— Gendres
- Thank you for this article! Ronny Polanski dropped a number of F-Bombs on me via email a few years ago for suggesting the gay activists were a special interest group. It's incredible what a coward Nutter has become.— bobmont
- Well the supreme court thinks corporations are people and money is speech, so until they come down from the LSD trip they're on, I don't take them seriously in any way, morally or legally. Abortion may be a moral issue, but so is the right of any person to control their own bodies. Legalized abortion is bad, but the alternative is much worse.
I'll agree (probably illogically) that these people should probably find something better to do than go after the boy scouts. We can talk about whether allegedly non-profit churches deserve tax exemptions some other time.— carl and sons - Less, I will make this short because I have school work to do.
You cannot make a blanket statement about the public schools in the USA....especially based on arbitrary numbers. Our country for all its flaws still has one of the world's best standards of living.
Finland maybe has less poverty than we do, but they do not accept as many immigrants from all over the poverty stricken world as we do. And they all have to go to school.
You are fairly literate and obviously know your way around a computer. Did you teach yourself all of that? Were you born reading and writing?
I see poor children every week, struggling to build skills that most adults take for granted. They are entitled to the best education we can provide, so that they will join the ranks of the producers.
— Gendres - I didn't realize I was reading Christine Flowers... Insert exaggerated eye rolling here. I didn't know that the BSA built the building. This sort of puts a different spin on it for me.
That being said, this would be a completely different story if the Boy Scouts discriminated against an ethnic group instead of a sexual minority. Flowers would have hands in the air and hairs in knots over it then. But, because we're talking about the LGBT community, it's, somehow, not as discriminatory. That's more of an issue for me. LGBT is a legitimate minority. Everyone's born with their sexuality. Allowing anyone to discriminate against anyone because of a way they were born is unacceptable, let alone un-American.— PotteryPete - Considering Ms. Flowers' enthusiasm for the pubbies' voter supression laws, I wouldn't be so sure that it would be a completely different story if it were ethnic discrimination. — carl and sons
- There was a solution to the problem, selling the land back to the Cradle of Liberty as they built the building in 1920. City liked the solution but, unfortunately, this had to be introduced by Councilman Darrell Clarke and he refused to introduce the resolution, thus killing the sale of the land.
The Gay community wants to destroy the Cradle of Liberty as they think they want the building so much and want to buy the land. Even if Nutter proposed to buy the building, the resolution would still be killed in City Council by Gay allies.
Solution to the problem, take a look at the Archdiocese office building now for sale and make an offer to buy it. Once the BSA makes such a move, then things will be lined so quickly to ensure a purchase of the Scouts building takes place by the city and the funds found and passed on to the BSA.
— Aces high - As a gay ally, I think that would have been the best solution. It speaks to the suspicion that there's an ulterior motive that Clarke wouldn't introduce the legislation. — PotteryPete
- You are a nasty individual. As a columist for a major newspaper, you would think you would be smart enough to realize that the Boy Scouts are really no different than the Catholic Church. Just as the city should not give a church land, it shouldn't give someone like the Boy Scouts land.— jonline
- If I had a child Boy Scout age, there is no way I'd ever let a homosexual scout leader anywhere hear him. If that offends the scoutmaster, oh well. Just look at the history of homosexual sexual predators over the last twenty years. What sane parent would ever place a child in the care of a homosexual group leader? And this goes for males or females. This nonsense is the tyranny of the minority and it must stop.— The Monk
- Even if you made any sense with that BS, it's not just about leaders, it's about kicking scouts out who are gay. — carl and sons
- When the Nutter administration continues this legal fight against the Boy Scouts, it sends a terrible message to the people of Philadelphia: that working-class families and average Americans-- the very people this city needs in order to maintain neighborhoods -- are less important than the LGBT activists behind the controversy. After all, it's the city's everyday families who participate and run local Scouting. Does anybody in City Hall realize this?— everydayguy
- I love how lgbt people asking for rights that are guaranteed to everyone else by law makes us 'activist' and somehow less than you. How quickly forget it was the families fleeing the city when then activists moved in and stabilized it. — jonline
- And let me follow up: fighting to evict the Scouts from the building they own also reinforces the idea to suburbanites that yes, the city is not a friendly place to raise a family.— everydayguy
Email Christine M. at cflowers1961@yahoo.com Reach Christine M. at cflowers1961@yahoo.com.
