Not going to end well. . . the latest on the Boy Scouts

Last updated on: November 7, 2016 at 9:33 am by Jane the Actuary

Not going to end well. . . the latest on the Boy Scouts 2016-11-07T09:33:24-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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This is the CNN.com report: “Boy Scouts revoke Seattle church’s charter over gay scoutmaster.” The report describes a scout troop whose charter was revoked because the troop and its sponsoring organization, a Methodist church in Seattle, insisted on keeping its openly gay scoutmaster. The details in the CNN article are a bit sketchy, since it gives the impression that the scouts have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, so I hunted a little more, and found more detail in this NBC piece, “‘Extremely Disappointing’: Scouts Boot Openly Gay Troop Leader.”

The story here still isn’t entirely clear, but it seems to be the case that the scuttled scoutmaster was not simply “a leader who happened to be gay” but much more than that: the article says,

[BSA executive Sharon] Moulds said she found out [Geoff] McGrath was gay only after NBC News contacted her. “It was then that we became aware of his intentions to make a public statement about his orientation and use our program as a means to further a personal agenda,” she wrote in an email.
. . .
McGrath said starting the unit was not a publicity stunt but a bid to serve youth and rejoin the contentious discussion around gay and lesbian adult membership. “If you don’t participate, you’re not part of the conversation,” McGrath, a 49-year-old software engineer, said in an exclusive interview.

“Yelling from the outside is not conversing. So we’re on the inside doing good work. Talking about the gay and lesbian issue is not the biggest part of what we do—it’s the smallest part.”

Even here, the chronology isn’t clear. Did McGrath actively seek publicity? Well, “yes,” in the sense that the church made a point of telling every boy’s family that he’s gay. But did he seek to publicize the situation outside the troop? Or did NBC News hear about this from someone else?

And when he said he wants to be “part of the conversation” — what did he mean? Actively protesting? Or seeking to demonstrate, over the long-term, that a gay man can be a good leader to young boys? And the church itself, which extended the invitation to McGrath — was he “innocently” the best man for the job, or did they, too, want to make a point of pushing the issue with a gay scoutmaster?

It worries me. There just doesn’t seem to be a good outcome here.

UPDATE: So I looked up the Rainer Beach Methodist Church, and I now think it’s highly likely that they established the gay-scoutmaster scout-troop with an aim to challenge the no-gay-leaders policy. Here’s their website: http://rainierbeachumc.org/ — and the pastor’s biography describes her, first and foremost, as an activist, with the two most prominent features of her resume her service as chaplain to Planned Parenthood and her gay/lesbian activism.

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