The world needs Boy Scouts, I am sure of it...

I never wanted to be in scouts.  As a child, our neighbors were heavily involved in Boy Scouts as members, scouters, and volunteers.  Over the early years of my youth, I would watch them come and go to regular meetings and activities in their uniforms and think to myself that I never wanted to do that.

“Too much hassle….too much conformity….short pants with green socks?!”

Consequently, I never gave the scouts much thought until, many years later, my son was in the first grade and my wife told me that I was taking him to Cub Scouts.  We argued; me dead set against it largely because of the stereotype I had of it.  She arguing for it largely because of the stereotype she had of it.

In the end, she prevailed and I took him to his first Cub Scout meeting. I recall it was very foreign to me – all this talk about “Akelas” and “Weblos” was over my head.  He had a great time – walked out of the meeting holding my hand and just beaming.

With wild hair and happy eyes, he looked up and me and asked “Dad? What’s the best I can be in scouting?”  Uncertain of the answer due to my own scouting inexperience, I replied “I don’t know, maybe an Eagle scout?”

He looked down, set his jaw and then told me “well that’s what I want to be then, an Eagle Scout.” I remember thinking at the time that just the week before he wanted to be Batman.  But, we signed up and I committed to go and stay involved as long as he wanted it.

Several years of Cub Scouts followed and I was still very much ambivalent about scouting.  Can’t make a derby car, no real outdoor skills at that point and my co-workers were all decidedly weary of me lugging Cub Scout popcorn to every meeting.  To me, scouting was just another commitment in an otherwise very hectic schedule. I was never completely at ease with it.

Complicating all of that was the issue of exclusion.  One of my best friends from school was gay.  I didn’t find out until years after we were in school together. When the topic came up, I remember asking him why he never told any of us.  “It’s hard,” he confessed.  “Very complicated.  I thought you guys wouldn’t want to be friends anymore…”   

I remember it as a turning point in my life – the realization that normal events associated with growing up; discovering that you are attracted to other people, dating, relationships, and holding hands – all of those deliriously awkward moments of adolescence are made infinitely more complicated for the teen who awakens into a world where he or she is gay. I remember thinking it was simply beyond absurd, and a bit painful, to think he believed we would abandon him because of who he was. I shared this with him and he said in a voice more weary than his 22 years “trust me, people hate me.”

 

The moment left me with some sensitivity to the issue – my good friend suffered for years worrying about what people would think of him, worrying that he had to keep a significant portion of his life not just private, but super-secret private.

So it was that in 2000, I was in law school and, like many in law school at that time, I spent more than a few minutes in any of a half dozen different classes debating the different constitutional merits of either party’s case in Boy Scouts of America et al. v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000).

I carried a lot of the feelings generated by my friendship with John into these debates in school.  The law was more than likely clear.  So too was the predictable outcome of the Supreme Court vote.  The joke in school was the true story that one of the Justices voting to uphold the ban wrote that he actually thought homosexuality only occurred in prisons, on desert islands and in forced survival situations like shipwrecks and plane crashes.

Given that, and as a student of the law, I was pretty much certain that the 2000 US Supreme Court wasn’t going to create a protected class of people based on sexual orientation using the Boy Scouts as the fulcrum to do so. And history shows that they didn’t.  A 5-4 court upheld the BSA’s exclusionary policy as a manifestation of BSA’s freedom of association. In other words, legally it was the right call according to the US Supreme Court.

Fast forward ten years to the fall of 2010.  My son, then 10 years old and in the 5^th grade, was riding out the waning moments of his Cub Scout career as a Weblo.  His Cub Pack went from having around 60 kids to having no more than 6 kids ten years after the BSA v Dale decision. I was eager with anticipation for the moment I could tell him “well, good work with Cub Scouts.  You gave it a first class effort but it looks like this is the end of the road.  No Boy Scouts, no Eagle Scout.  Let’s move on to the next great challenge…”  

So I had been rehearsing, mentally, the “talk” with my son for several weeks during my morning commute.  I practiced the talk I planned to have with my wife and him several times and had just about refined it to the level where I was ready to pick the date by which I would break the news that we were leaving the dream of Eagle Scout behind us.

There was a camporee planned and I expected the Cub Scout presence to be very small – perhaps just one Weblo family (us). That would present the perfect opportunity to introduce the topic of how we were spinning our wheels with this backward looking organization.

Perhaps adding accelerant to the fire burning inside of me was the fact that for this particular weekend, I was forced to say yet another “no thank you, we have a scouting event” when a colleague offered free football tickets. These tickets were to the annual Michigan State/Michigan football game. 

To say I was ambivalent, ten years post-Dale, is generous. I was in fact itching to move on from scouting and pursue other ways to kill off a beautiful autumn weekend in Michigan. Free football tickets aside, by the fall of 2010 I had no love lost for the Boy Scouts of America. I fundamentally disagreed with the exclusionary policy.  It seemed to be based in prejudice and was contrary to anything I believed in terms of civil rights.  I was actively looking for ways to get my only son away from something I considered bigoted and irrational.

Committed to the idea that this would be our last scouting event, I loaded up the car and went to a fall camporee at a scout camp in Central Lower Michigan. Nothing extravagant. Not at all far from our home, but a very nice camp with a long, uphill curving driveway leading in. 

It was a camp I hadn't been to before.  Set among gorgeous rolling hills heavily wooded with stands of hardwood and pine, it appeared to be a first rate camp. As we worked our way up the neatly paved drive leading up the slope, I noticed there were – spaced out at even intervals – neatly lettered yellow signs arranged along the camp’s driveway. 

They stood dappled at the tree-line on the edge of the forest – almost as much a part of the landscape as the plentiful cedar and white pine.  They said, in successive order “A Scout is….  trustworthy …… loyal ….. helpful ….. friendly ….. courteous ….. kind ….. obedient ….. cheerful ….. thrifty ….. brave ….. clean ….. and reverent.”

They didn't say anything about sexuality, or law books, or politics, or courtrooms.  Just plain old words describing extraordinary virtues. They described the essence of scouting.  Scouting, in that moment, began to crystalize for me as something that could not, and should not, be defined by a single polarizing issue.

Something about each handmade sign caught in my throat as I drove by.  My father died when my son was 5 years old. Much of this whole “being a dad” thing has ended up me doing it without the benefit of my father to guide me on what’s right for a kid. The signs were handmade, tidy, but with faded paint.  They had been there a while but were tended to by someone who had an eye toward their importance.

For my son, the day was one to climb the “Victory Tower” and to Shoot BB Guns and to have all kinds of scout fun.  For me, it began what was a serious reflection on what scouting would come to mean for me personally; what it truly meant to me as a dad. It began a period for me that I later recognized as my time to consider how I could best spend my efforts in bringing up a boy with timeless values and a solid sense of confidence and service.

Those signs staring at me from the shadowy tree-line were the beginning of a new commitment for me with scouting.  I did not have the conversation I planned and practiced with my wife and son.  Instead I researched the scout law and eventually sat down with my son and had a different conversation:

“Michael, the world needs Boy Scouts.”

Not the kind of thing any who know me as a bleeding heart, mushy-headed college liberal would expect me to say.  Growing up, the term “boy scout” was a put-down.  Something synonymous with a “goody two-shoes” or “teacher’s pet.”  But I was convinced of it then and am doubly certain of it now. 

“The world needs Boy Scouts.”

I have watched my son grow from a Tenderfoot to a newly minted Life Scout.  Have joined him on countless service projects in our community and watched him mature from a tiny little fellow in pants and shirt way too big, to a solid young man who, in the thick of the worst thunderstorm I have ever endured outside, reminded me "Dad, this happens every time I come out with the scouts.  Trust me, you're going to be ok."  His mom and I have followed his travels from Montana hiking over the Great Divide down to Florida Seabase where next month we will take our SCUBA certifications and test our mettle SCUBA diving in the ocean. 

“The world needs Boy Scouts.”

Along the way, I was lucky enough to get involved as an Assistant Scoutmaster, Unit Commissioner and as a member of a great Wood Badge patrol (Owl) at C2-271-12.  My Wood Badge experience was held at the very same camp where I had my scouting epiphany several years before.

Having spent this time and energy; having come to embrace the idea that the world needs Boy Scouts, I’ve also become convinced that the Boy Scouts need the world.  I had the good fortune of joining scouts from 22 countries at the Michigan International Camporee in the summer of 2012. There it was my pleasure to join in the community of international scouting and discuss with them the development of  scouting in other countries.

If you accept that the Boy Scouts need the world, then you must also accept that the Boy Scouts need to reflect on the aims of scouting as originated, not by the BSA v Dale case in 2000, but rather by the words and vision of Lord Baden-Powell when he cultivated this dream.  The Boy Scouts exist not because some council in New Jersey won a legal battle in 2000.  They exist because of the vision of an extraordinary man in 1908.

Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, wrote the original Scout law in the publication Scouting for Boys in 1908. Included in that text is the tenet that a Scout is a friend to all and a brother to all other scouts.

"A SCOUT IS A FRIEND TO ALL, AND A BROTHER TO EVERY OTHER SCOUT, NO MATTER TO WHAT SOCIAL CLASS THE OTHER BELONGS. If a scout meets another scout, even though a stranger to him, he must speak to him, and help him in any way that he can, either to carry out the duty he is then doing, or by giving him food, or, as far as possible, anything that he may be in want of. A scout must never be a SNOB. A snob is one who looks down upon another because he is poorer, or who is poor and resents another because he is rich. A scout accepts the other man as he finds him, and makes the best of him -- "Kim," the boy scout, was called by the Indians "Little friend of all the world," and that is the name which every scout should earn for himself."

“…Accept the other man as he finds him, and make the best of him…” was Baden-Powell’s approach to  differences that might arise between scouts. The presumption, unstated but obvious, is that the brotherhood of scouting transcends those differences.  It demands that we approach our neighbors – strangers and friends alike – with a bias toward temperance and a commitment to the non-judgmental.  You cannot be a friend to all if you are wagging your finger, or spewing hateful rhetoric, or passing judgment on one lifestyle while freely indulging your own lifestyle choices absent having to answer to others for them.

To be a brother to all Scouts, as Baden-Powell intended when he blazed the trail for all other scouts, you cannot approach your fellow scouts or scouters and tell them “you cannot be my brother because of who you love.”  If Baden-Powell’s words have meaning; if the notion “a brother to all other scouts” will indeed have vitality, then that brotherhood cannot be revoked merely because a scout is gay.

Making the rounds presently on social media is the story of Bruce “Trip” McMillan, a 37-year veteran professional Scouter currently living in Charlotte, N.C.  Trip’s noteworthy take on the exclusionary policy is that the practice of excluding brothers; the practice of institutionally excluding scouts and scouters based on who they love, is contrary to the community of scouting.

“Shame on us (scouting) as a movement,” McMillan says, “if we continue to abandon ‘one of our boys’ at perhaps the most difficult moment of their life.”

A brother, a scouting BROTHER who is coming to realize his developing sexual identity, does not need to be abandoned by his brothers in scouting.  He needs that community of friendship, that continuity of fellowship and virtue.  Scouting needs to be standing taller than what has been presently made of their virtues.  Scouting needs to say to that boy, “here you are among the scouts, and the scouts are among the best.  So here you will thrive.  We will find the best in you.”

Change will come.  I am sure of it.  No species on Earth has ever purposely starved itself into extinction.  So true with the scouts, whose membership continues to shrink while its “brand” has been hijacked into this issue.

Change will come when Boy Scouts of America comes to realize they need the world as much as the world needs the Scouts.

Change will come, because the world needs scouts.

Change must come, because a weary world wants for that boy scout “constant” - the virtuous helper, leader, and friend to all to continue.

Change must come, and it will come.

Dennis Armistead is a writer, labor relations professional and mediator, and scouter from Bath, Mi.  As a member of Wood Badge class C2-271-12, Owl Patrol, one of his ticket items was to write an essay regarding the Exclusionary Practice of the Boy Scouts of America as it relates to homosexual scouts and scouters.  This is his essay. All rights reserved to the author.  The World Needs Scouts©