December 10, 2007--Be Prepared

Perversely, when I joined the Boy Scouts as an innocent 13-year-old, I quickly and happily realized that that innocence would soon, at last, be dispelled.

As part of the orientation to the lore, pledges, salutes, and best of all secret handshakes, we were also required to learn the Scout motto and pledge. Especially the various literal and metaphoric meanings of the ultimate aspiration of Scouting—Being Prepared.

My innocence of the world was such that I did not have any awareness as I did later in life that much of this preparedness was of a paramilitary sort. Perhaps liked to the constitutional right and responsibility to “bear arms.” Unfortunately, we did not have any to bear in my troop but the uniform and disciplining should have at least provided a clue as to what was really up. As should have been the obsession with leaning techniques to survive in the woods. To ultra-urban kids from Brooklyn starting fires using just flint and steel and learning which roots and berries were edible and which poisonous seemed more exotic than necessary preparation for survival after being successfully invaded by some inchoate.

But if Be Prepared was our mantra, so be it. I did, after all, love the uniform, canteen, and lariat.

Fortunately, Stewie Cassell was a Scouting mate and he had a very different version of what it meant to Be Prepared: he was less interested in surviving in the woods than fooling around there. So with a wink to the rest of us in the Beaver Patrol (can you believe it, that’s who we were), slipping a Trojan from his wallet, he leered, “This is what you use to be prepared.”

Though I had no idea what he meant, I feebly winked back at him and to myself pledged, in a very un-Scoutlike way, that I would also devote myself to learning about that kind of preparedness.

Sexual awakening during adolescence is of course its dominant feature. So much so that even the restrictions and discipline of Scouting cannot tamp it down. So it is hardly a surprise that the Boy Scouts with its militia traditions has devoted much of its energy to denouncing, forbidding, and ferreting out any inklings of homosexuality.

Of course, we Beavers had no such inklings. True, Larry D ____ was always polishing his boots and ironing his bandana and checking himself out in the mirror and from this we should have known that something was up; but this was, yo, Brooklyn, the borough of real men . . . and boys.

Later in life I became aware of the Scouts’ heterosexual agenda. But until recently, oblivious to the full story, I thought that focus, as in the Catholic Church, was to “protect” boys who were in the care of Scoutmasters from those who were gay and thus couldn’t restrain themselves from molesting them. Putting aside the evidence that gay teachers, Scoutmasters, and even homosexual priests are no more likely to prey upon young boys for whom they have responsibility than gay men in the larger population, since the Scouts are a private organization, like it or not, the law allows them to exclude gays from becoming troop leaders. But, because they act in this exclusionary way, there have been numerous court decisions not to allow the Scouts to use public facilities for their activities. All well and good as far as I’m concerned.

But just this week I came to realize that more than this is at stake. The New York Times reported (article linked below) that the city of Philadelphia finally managed, after years of trying, to evict the local Boy Scout chapter from using a municipal building. One it has occupied, effectively rent free, since 1928.

Embedded in the article was mention of a 2000 Supreme Court 5-4 ruling that upheld the Scout’s right to expel gay Scouts. Not just predatory Scoutmasters but the kids themselves. Like poor Larry D ____. If the Army can have a don’t-ask-don’t tell policy, why not these little soldiers? For that answer, you’ll have to ask Justices Scalia and Thomas.

Or the Scouts national spokesman who said, “Since we were founded, we believe that open [as opposed to closeted?] homosexuality would be inconsistent with the values that we want to communicate.” And he added, “A belief in God is also mentioned in the Scout oath. We believe those values are important.”

God too. If I had only known I wonder what they would have thought if they knew that pretty much all the kids in the Beaver Patrol were Jews. I think, though, that there was one Italian. Like Stewie, Louie also knew (wink) about Being Prepared. And from him I learned more than I ever did from Mr. K ____ , our Scoutmaster.

But you know, now I’m even beginning to wonder about him. There was that overnight hike to Alpine, New Jersey and, after we were all bedded down in out little Pup Tents, Mr. ____ . Well, that’s another story.