Don’t Screw With the Boy Scouts

       As I sipped on my latte the other day at a spot on Larchmont Boulevard I noticed a young lady soliciting passersby.  This type of thing is common.  Usually it’s someone asking for donations for a local homeless shelter or another worthwhile cause. 

Eavesdropping on one of her pitches my ears perked up when I heard her refer to the Boy Scouts of America.  I immediately took an interest because I had been a Scout for several years.  It was one of the best times of my life--learning archery, camping, wilderness survival, first aid, swimming, astronomy, emergency rescue, and a host of other skills that I’ve used throughout the years.  Sometimes I kick myself for not staying in longer because I had a good shot at making eagle. 

Listening intently, I began to realize she was collecting signatures for a petition to take away the Boy Scout’s tax exemption as a non-profit because they didn’t allow gays in the organization.  As she threw out references to discrimination and California state law my blood began to boil.  I’m not sure if it was just her offensive mission or the dental work from earlier that morning, but it was starting to hit a nerve.  So, I stood and confronted her.  I mean, geez, what’s next--prohibiting old ladies from being walked across the street?

So, we had a little exchange and it was obvious this college indoctrinated, little indie rocker knew more about The Black Keys tour dates then she did about Scouting.  She insisted the costs they would incur from denying their tax-exempt status wouldn’t affect individual troops but only the district leadership, which of course is total crap.  Troops would be required to pay sales tax on fundraisers like dinners and Christmas tree sales.  Not to mention, increased district costs would take away money from camps that all troops use.  Then she goes on, telling me how most of the troops were in favor of lifting the ban. But if you know anything about the values in rural locations where most of the troops reside, this argument is obviously just another shovel load.

Walking away, I began to wonder why sexuality in any form is a Boy Scout issue.  This stuff was not even close to being on the table when I was in the BSA.  How did we get to the point where society is so sexualized that a child organization is forced to make an up or down decision on any sexuality?  Well, let’s see.  The 60’s and 70’s left-wing counter culture brought us the sexual revolution.  Then the 80’s drowned us in high school sex education that turned into middle school sex education.  Then the 90’s came along and the left decided to push alternative sex in school and it even seeped into the elementary level. Of course, a lot of kids can barely read, write, or add but this is what some try to pass off as progress. But who in the hell are they trying to kid?  Now we look around and everything from car insurance, to domain names, to chicken wings is sold with sex.  They’ve even got lingerie shops for little girls.  Isn’t it great when we go all out to mimic the closing days of the Romans and the Greeks?  How did they turn out again?

At any rate, the point is:  There never would have been a Scout gay ban starting in the 1980’s if the left hadn’t promoted the sexualization of children.  This is a controversy the left created themselves and now that they’ve fostered widespread sexual anarchy across all age groups they can pretend to take the so-called moral high ground and marginalize traditional organizations like the Scouts--a group that just wants to continue the good work they’ve been doing for over a century.   

Scott Kurtz who is allied with Moveon.org is the former Boy Scout that’s pushing the policy change, complaining that, “leaders of the Boy Scouts disgrace this once proud institution.”  What planet is this guy from?  Does his definition of “once proud” insinuate some Boy Scout history that’s sexual in some way or even gay friendly?  Well, if you can’t figure this one out, nothing like that ever existed.  I know if some kind of sexual activity, gay or otherwise, was going on when I was wearing the uniform it would have been eradicated.  For goodness sakes, we were constructing lean-tos and building campfires.  Sex never entered into it.   But now they’ve forced the hand of the Boy Scouts.  They’ve manufactured this over sexualized society and the Scouts have thoughtfully held steadfast, recognizing that it conflicts with its traditions. So, suddenly the BSA is now considered the bad guy by the sanctimony of the esoteric class.  This is nothing more than what’s commonly referred to in the criminal world as a set-up.   

I’ve heard other lefties talk about America itself in such terms too, making reference to this “once great nation”.  But it’s clear the left has nothing but contempt for the history of this country and some who are actually truthful will admit it.  But others act like they somehow approve of America’s past, just so they don’t appear to be too outside the mainstream.  The truth is that if you were to take your average fanaticized state college grad from today and plopped them in the middle of 1950’s America, bet your life someone would be calling the FBI to report them as a Soviet spy.  These people were and are ideological enemies of the American tradition. 

However, for the Left it’s largely not about getting it right.  It’s about getting it done and boy have they been busy.  What started out as a fringe group that Germany kicked out and America graciously amnestied in the 19^th century they’ve acquired immense power--now controlling state education, pop culture, most of the news media, and a huge share of the government.  Even big business and religion, some of the last havens of traditional American thought, have been infected by left wing ideology to a large extent.  And the cost to our youngest citizens is overwhelming with widespread psychological problems, record suicide, sky-high anxiety that’s led to an epidemic of child teeth grinding that sounds almost Biblical, and never before seen levels of mundane pleasure seeking that’s fostered unparalleled levels of unhappiness.  And if you think the Left is way too cozy with your kids now, wait until these statists take them away altogether because you’ve been deemed an old-fashioned bigot that’s too unfit to parent.  I’d bet my father’s grave it’s not that far down the road, if not already upon us.

          The sexualization of our youth is reminiscent of the Fudrucker’s scene in Idiocracy--amusing on film but devastating in reality.  So, this is a call to arms.  Contact Sacramento without delay.  Don’t allow the politicians to deprive our children of what remains of their innocence.  California, please, please don’t screw with the Boy Scouts.   

Losing Control

            Reflecting upon the horrors that shook Sandy Hook Elementary School and the other mass killings of recent years, a flood of solutions have been offered to deter future episodes of this kind.  Some of the more common knee-jerk remedies on the table include increased levels of gun control, more dramatic mental health treatment, and ramping up public security.

The irony of such recommendations is that they’re all based on approaches that have been tried before and have had a sizable level of ineffectiveness.  Adam Lanza, the Newton shooter, was legally barred from owning firearms and the school he attacked enforced a type of gun control as an established “gun free zone”.  He was also drowning in a sea of therapy and mood altering drugs.  Not to mention, the very fear of being committed is what, apparently, sparked his desire to go on this deadly rampage in the first place.  Furthermore, Sand Hook had just begun instituting a slew of updated security features--features that had been refined for years and were considered the newest and best when it came to effective protections. 

However, none of these precautions that were so popular before the shooting, and are now being repackaged as deterrents to future shootings, did what they were supposed to do.  Sure, we can double our efforts in taking away guns, doping people up, and turning public places into super-security zones but these measures only deal with the surface issues of mass killing.  That’s why these tragedies continue to occur and become increasingly barbaric.  They seem to only deal with symptoms and not the cause.

It’s certainly true that some of the surface level band-aids being thrown around will appear as legitimate fixes at a glance.  Emboldening these measures would probably minimize the ability and motivation of some killers.  Unfortunately, we’ve been programmed in the modern world to think that passing a new law will make for a better society, but it simply will not.  Making better people is what makes a better society.  The fundamental problem with Adam Lanza wasn’t that he could acquire firearms, or wasn’t receiving appropriate psychiatric treatment, or lived in an environment that was mired in too much insecurity.  The fundamental problem with this mass child murderer was that he didn’t have the will to do good.  In other words, he had a broken soul.

These days, interjecting the condition of the soul into a discussion like Sandy Hook usually brings responses like disbelief, indifference, or boredom.  I can only imagine the scores of eyes that must be rolling.  But in historical American society, which was far from perfect but superior in many ways, the state of the heart was considered paramount to creating good people and a better community.  It is certainly true that gun deaths are nothing new and the mentally ill have always been with us, but what has changed is the vast number of suicides and murder/suicides, the random targeting of innocent children, and the widespread categorization of so many of the population as mentally unstable.  So, what’s different now that’s led our country down such a dark path?

In the 19^th century European philosophers began to adopt new views on human existence.  Before that time Western culture almost unanimously agreed that God is a reality and His morality, the Judeo-Christian ethic, is the best tool to positively influence society.  Slowly, though, the departure from this founding notion began to take shape in America through academia, the arts, science, and law.  Then the 20^th century saw the first atheistic countries, by way of the Soviet Union and other communist nations.  They made official the echoes of decades earlier that there is no meaning to life and God is dead.  It is no coincidence that these “godless” endeavors were destined to be the greatest hotbeds of mass murder the world had ever known.  These entities started proxy movements in the West in places like America.  So, now there rose a political defiance to traditional thought, adding to the counterculture that had already been brewing in certain sectors.  These elements of radical socialism and atheism birthed what we know today as the ideological left. 

This faction has worked tirelessly to remove traditional thought from society and with it our commonly shared moral compass.  What began with the elimination of prayer and scripture reading in public schools, has now digressed into the vilification of the very mention of Christmas.   In addition, atheism has effectively fought to change the public perception of Hell from reality to myth, eliminating one of society’s greatest hedges against egregious behavior.  Many in our modern world might find the notion of Hell fantastic, but the question remains:  Are the actions of Adam Lanza more likely in a society that still has a general fear of everlasting consequences or more likely in one that ignores and even stigmatizes the belief of these age-old repercussions?  Keep in mind that just about every civilization to walk the planet has held some notion of an afterlife and the possibility of punishment therein.  Ever since the Egyptians, mankind has acknowledged this standard, almost unanimously.  

It’s not until this age have we seen ample arrogance to defy such traditions on a grand scale.  The left has even gone so far as to tear down the very notion of right and wrong by equivocating good with bad.  The moral relativism of modern thinking allows that something might be wrong on one occasion but the same act might be fine in another setting, devaluing the very notion of principles altogether.  You see this manifest in the present discussion where the debate turns to guns and psychiatry and hardly touches on the morality of the killer, because most people reporting the story don’t even believe in the traditional barometers of right and wrong anymore.  It’s sad, but these shooters grew up in a strange new world that doesn’t necessarily teach that senselessly robbing a group of random children of their lives is something that is absolutely wrong, because the notion that something can be deemed absolutely wrong is no longer a widely shared view, thanks to left-wing academia’s influence on popular perception.

This lack of public conscience is more detrimental to our way of life than many casual observers would care to admit.  Our Constitutional right to bear arms only works if we are willing to govern ourselves. In other words, the Constitution was set up to give broad rights to citizens (as opposed to what you may be hearing these days) but that openness is dependent upon the other half of the equation being fulfilled, which is self-rule.  And the founders recognized that if there wasn’t a religious element steering the public conscience then the self-governance applied would be inadequate and the government would take a larger and larger share of control over the people.  This is what has appeared to happen over the last century.  As a people, we’ve turned our back on God-given morality, making us less able to rule ourselves, and, as a result, government intervention has taken a larger share of authority over our lives.  It seems Washington is more than happy to adapt to the situation and fill the vacuum in leadership.

Beyond this fundamental reshuffling of American life, leftist thought has promoted various sociological changes, whose results contribute to the mental instability of people like Adam Lanza.  Traditionally, gender roles use to be very distinct and clear.  In the mid 20^th century, you were considered less than a real man if you weren’t productive and independent.  You were expected to be a protector of women and children, even to your own detriment.  But in universities around this nation gender distinctions and traditional roles have been made into oppressive social constructs.  Gradually, these flawed revisions of conduct seeped into modern thinking and are now ingrained in the public consciousness.  In our feminized society the notion of being a real man is something akin to wife beating.  It’s clear that Lanza was coddled and emasculated, keeping him far from reaching maturity and, therefore, manhood.  So, like Lanza’s mother, we continue to roll out a slew of hot-tempered boys that fail to grasp the idea that attacking defenseless children is beneath a real man.  Nor, does society even endorse the pursuit of fulfilling such traditional roles any longer because they’re met with a flurry of leftist slanders like oppressor, patriarch, and chauvinist.                         

Lanza’s family life also shows the brokenness of applied modern, leftist thinking.  His parents had divorced and his father hadn’t been around in 6-months, or so.  To this end, the Left has worked tirelessly to marginalize the importance of the traditional family structure, the nuclear family format that is the basis for every civilization that’s ever existed.  Conversely, there’s been a push to glorify or normalize any alternative in the name of inclusion.  But what happens when kids don’t get the proper influences needed to become well-adjusted members of society?  Certainly, not all of them act out violently, but many do and, like this man, to fatal ends.  If there was more of a stigma attached to infidelity and divorce like there used to be, Lanza may have had the proper rearing and never gone on his armed temper tantrum.

Anti-traditionalism has cost the American experiment dearly, to the point that it’s nearly unrecognizable.  With our, almost inexplicable, obsession to embrace any contrary notion that infects our educational system or popular culture, we’ve watered down and ultimately rejected the things that made America work truly well.  Conventional family structures, traditional gender roles, limited government, individual responsibility, and a moral basis that’s driven by something higher than the failings of men are ideas that have been largely washed away by the tide of modernity--and in towns like Newton, the most innocent among us have paid the price.

Those trying to make sense of the Newton shooting by proposing a gun ban or some feckless dialogue on psychology or giving cause to an increased police state are, I fear, missing the point.  I think Marsha Lanza, the shooter’s aunt, puts it rather well, “It’s the person that does the killing, not the gun.”  And, “I thank God everyday my kids have faith, my kids know right from wrong…You’ve got to give your kids roots.”  The atheists and leftists may have tried to sever our roots to traditional understanding but that grants increased cause for the rational to rekindle the methods that have worked so well in America.  Alas, it’s not about gun control, but, rest assured, it is about self-control.