A lengthy comment, but I have a lot to say.
My father and brother were both Eagle Scouts. My brother is gay, but he was also born a male, and didn't ever try to pretend he was a female. Neither did he make an issue of his internal leanings. In fact, I believe he hid who he really was until he graduated at the Masters level in college, and he moved far, far away before becoming "himself". You had to know my Catholic parents to understand why.
My father was a Scout Leader for many years, and he earned the Order of the Beaver, for his hard work and community involvement.
I was a Girl Scout, and my entire troop was disbanded and we were drummed out of the Girl Scouts because one of our members had a lawyer father, and he encouraged and helped his daughter to create a petition over an issue of unfairness. Many of us were bullied or threatened into signing. It seems that left leaning lawyers do cause an immense amount of trouble. I was ten years old.
More recently, one of my son's good friends, (when he was 11 or 12), became a pervert and a pedophile at puberty, and this friend's adopted father was very religious, and dragged this kid into scouting, where he said some very sick things to a bunch of 7 year old cub scouts, propositioned them for sex, and he is now in jail. Perverts and pedophiles are predators, and a parent who allows his or her child to go off camping with someone they don't know EXTREMELY well is lazy, uncaring, and neglectful.
My former church had an internal scouting program, and only the boys were able to participate. The girls had their own church programs and learned different skills. They had their own summer camp, and they learned all the things that the women of old used to learn, back about a hundred years ago. This was not a feminist church by any means.
When the Boy Scouts allowed girls to become members, it went against the old customs and teachings of that church, and so the entire church discontinued their involvement with the Boy Scouts. They decided, as a group and as a church, that they could no longer belong to a group that would force them to violate their own teachings about how to raise their children...(which was basically, separation of the sexes).
I am not BLAMING the LGBT's for this destruction of society as we once knew it. It is destructive to old institutions, and we are so fortunate that we can choose to reject the Boy Scouts, or even remake them as we wish, in a country where we are allowed our freedoms. I think they can be continued within churches, for example...as private institutions with private membership.
We really have to remember that gay people were once hated and reviled, called perverts, beaten, and killed. They were kept outside of society, and they were shamed publicly. They were not allowed to have normal lives. My own brother's home was broken into several times, and back in those bad old days, they kept weapons under their mattresses. My brother had to live in hiding...and even tried to marry a female, a long time ago, to camouflage his true nature. Thankfully he chose not to lie and ruin someone else's life. But he was not a pedophile, either...and it is pedophiles who have caused the many lawsuits.
I think we should lay the blame for the lawsuits and the abuse where it belongs...pedophiles are in a class by themselves.
