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American Untouchables
By Harry T. Cook
2/22/13
 | | Harry T. Cook |
The Boy Scouts of America are probably still tying square knots and camping out in the wilderness as my troop did in 1954. Now, however, under internal and external pressure, the national leadership of the BSA seems -- commendably -- to be trying to untie the knot that binds it to a policy of exclusion.
It has come down to what a prospective scout may have in mind where his genital organ is concerned. He who fantasizes its use in company with another male may not be welcome to don the blue uniform and give the three-fingered salute.
The BSA is grappling with the force of tired religious and political arguments to the effect that homosexual behavior is unnatural, unwholesome and unacceptable. Its national governing board continues to dither over what to do, no doubt counting the cost, on the one hand, of inclusion and, on the other, exclusion.
It used to be African-American youths who were banned from scout membership, or in cases when they were admitted it was to racially segregated troops and often not permitted to wear the uniform. Eventually, all that got worked out.
Girls have their own scouting program, but it is clear that its male counterpart does not admit them. However, the BSA Venturing and Learning for Life programs are open to young men and women ages 14 through 21. Problem partly solved.
Avowed atheists or agnostics need not apply to the Boy Scouts whose pledged duties are to God and country. The God part and all the fuss over it recalls the critique Lucretius brought to such matters: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum: "To what heights of evil are men driven by religion."
Notwithstanding, the scouting program is a private, non-government undertaking, therefore its leadership is free to impose admission criteria with no consultation with any authority other than its own. Nothing in this essay should be taken as an argument with that.
That said, the various admission policies over the 103 years the Boy Scouts organization has been in existence seem always to have posited a "them" as opposed to "us." African-Americans, non-believers and gays serially have constituted the scouts' "them." They became untouchables, because what has distinguished them from an alleged "normal" is wrongly thought to be contagious.
Should a black youth have become close friends with a white youth in a scout troop, what would such a relationship say about the widespread belief once held by many whites that blacks were inferior genetically, socially and intellectually?
The friendship of Huck Finn and Jim, a slave, depicted in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of how a young white boy decides to unlearn things he had been taught or absorbed concerning racial differences. It is that about the book which still makes some white folk uneasy, and why, for example, I was not permitted to check it out of the library in the village where I lived as a boy. The librarian said she needed my parents' written permission to do so. She not only got the requested permission, but, as I remember, a fairly pointed lecture from my father about the matter.
The only black people I ever knew whilst living in that village were the maids and cooks brought to it by those we called "resorters" who came to their lakeside cottages for the summer. There was no chance then that I would have had an opportunity to befriend anyone my age whose skin color I did not share.
Unlike skin color, atheism and agnosticism really are contagious. One has only to read enough in historical and philosophical literature to appreciate how theisms of various kinds have propelled people into violence for the tragically simple reason that belief apart from knowledge, proclamation apart from fact and faith apart from reason leave the human being with little choice but to defend his singular or group conviction. That makes a prospective scout who can't or won't espouse belief in the biblical God one of "them." He is considered to be infected, at best with doubt, at worst with outright unbelief.
Is homosexuality likewise contagious? Would a 12-year-old boy whose sexual orientation is not yet fully formed -- except by religious or cultural oppression -- be likely to entertain advances from another 12-year-old boy? And if he did, would that turn him into another one of "them"? I had my first crush when I was 13. Her name was Wava, and everybody thought it was cute -- even her mother. I cannot imagine what it would have been like if I had confessed to having a crush on her cousin Eugene. I would immediately have become a "them."
That's the trouble with exclusivity in the organization of society -- exclusivity based on race, religion and sexuality. A person's race is a person's race, and there is nothing to do about it but celebrate it -- except maybe to raft down the Mississippi with him.
A person's philosophical or religious orientation is likely over time to be fluid, and in a nation that was founded as a secular republic with establishment of religion banned outright in the first 10 words of the First Amendment, indefatigable efforts to convert the other and overt derision of the other's thinking and being are just plain un-American.
The same canon applies to attitudes about sexuality. It has been demonstrated that one's sexual orientation is as much formed genetically as it is environmentally. And whatever it is, it is. In any event, the LGBT community is not a leper colony.
Yet another set of untouchables is now visible among us: the unemployed. They reached that economic nadir -- most of them -- as a result of unregulated financial finagling among the elite in the years that led up to the recent and persistent recession. They can't get jobs -- many of them -- because of the lacunae in their work records. Prospective employers must think of them as lepers, too.
Neither race, nor ethnic identity, nor religious orientation (if any), nor unemployment through no fault of the unemployed should determine who's worthy of acceptance. It is, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once so memorably put it, the content of one's character that should count for or against a person.
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