I'm no Boy Scout Now, "So-and-so is no Boy Scout" has long been a derogatory statement; it's used to imply that the person in question is dishonest or, at the very least, of questionable moral character. But with the way the Boy Scouts of America have been acting lately, I take my never having been a Boy Scout as something I'm relieved about. I'll get into why that is a bit further down; first, let me lay out what experiences I did have with Scouting.
I was a Cub Scout; I was also a Webelo, which is the intermediary level that separated the boys from... well, the bigger boys. This wasn't something I wholly volunteered for -- my parents denied my repeated requests to drop out, because (I'm guessing) they felt that interacting with other boys my own age would be good for a loner like myself.
What did I get out of it? I guess that it did help me a little bit in coming out of my shell, but really the most tangible thing was (and is) my hobby of comic book collecting. And that really came more from hanging around with the older kids in a troop my father worked with, who humored my tagging along with them, than from anything I had in common with the boys in my own packs. I couldn't tie a square knot today if my life depended on it.
So why didn't I go on and become a Boy Scout? Didn't I want to be an Eagle Scout? Well, there were a number of reasons. I had really bad allergies as a kid, so anything involving the outdoors I tended to run away from screaming. I got involved, instead, with a youth group at my best friend's church. But to be completely honest, my main reason for not being a Boy Scout was, I just didn't have any interest in it -- I would rather have been reading, or trying to draw comic books, or writing stories, than working on merit badges and getting up close and personal with grizzly bears, deer ticks, and rattlesnakes.
In high school I got involved with an Explorers troop. The connection between Exploring and Scouting was treated like a piece of interesting but mostly irrelevant trivia; we didn't recite any oaths, salute the flag, or do anything like that. There were no merit badges to earn, only trips to different job sites to look at what the employees did. And although we met in the basement of a United Methodist church, religion was never really discussed -- we were there to learn about the job market, not be instilled with "traditional family values," and so my friend Will's openness about his atheism was never a source of tension.
Looking back, I'd characterize my Cub Scouting experiences in the early 80s as tolerable overall, although a bit too preachy at times. My Webelo experiences were more pleasant, as the group was smaller and more friendly. And I really enjoyed Explorers a lot. So if I have a son, will I encourage him to be a Scout? Without hesitation, I answer "No."
As Dan Kennedy said in a recent Boston Phoenix column, the Boy Scouts have always been a bit odd, always been a bit militaristic; and, I would add, in a post-Watergate US, their level of patriotism seems a bit naive. But if this charmingly quaint stuff were the worst of it, I'd have no problem with the Scouts; I'd just see them as an eccentric, but potentially useful, mentoring program geared to teach boys self-discipline. The thing is, the Boy Scouts of America have gotten too big for their (brown) britches lately, and have turned into a force working for the evil of religious fascism.
The BSA home office recently ordered the Unitarian Universalist Association (the religion with which I now associate) to stop issuing our "Religion in Life" award to Boy Scouts who are members of UU congregations. (The Religion in Life award is not a Merit Badge; rather, it is a church-bestowed award for wearing on the uniform alongside Merit Badges. The Roman Catholic church has something similar, as do the Southern Baptist Convention, the Latter-Day Saints, and the Muslim and Jewish communities in the United States.) The Scouts' problem with Unitarian Universalism stems from three points:

UUA President John Buehrens, himself a former Eagle Scout, wrote back to the Boy Scout leaders, saying that our church will not comply with the order to stop issuing awards to Scouts in our congregations. In his letter, chastised the BSA's arrogance in presuming to tell a religious group what it could and could not tell young members about their own religion. He furthermore asked if the Boy Scouts -- a group supposedly instilling boys with the courage to stand by their own convictions -- really wanted to be seen denying membership to an earnest Buddhist child, for instance, whose faithfulness to his own religion did not include belief in a deity. There's supposed to be a meeting between UU and BSA officials in October to discuss the issues; hopefully, there will be a peaceful resolution that won't result in the Boy Scouts becoming a de facto hate group.
The problem is, the Boy Scouts seem to want it both ways. They want to receive all the benefits of a non-partisan, non-political, charitable organization: access to school facilities for meetings, a tax-free status, and such. They also want to be able to spout off religious doctrine with no one questioning them and promote a (very political) agenda of discrimination against homosexuals. This is as hypocritical as, say, Focus on the Family claiming to be an educational, non-political, religious group, when they're clearly a conservative lobbying organization.
The rallying cry of the Boy Scouts here is the same as that of every other homophobic activist: "Tolerance is a one-way street. Let us believe as we wish." That's also the rallying cry of the people who seek to break down the wall of separation between church and state that our founding fathers, themselves recent victims of religious persecution, so painstakingly built. The thing is, in these people's case, it's a lie.
The truth is, you don't see many gays and lesbians passing around petitions looking to lock up heterosexual couples. I've never even once heard of atheists organizing a private school in the United States and then looking to leech off tax money to send their children there away from "those awful religious influences." It seems to me that the people who spend so much energy screeching about someone else's "special rights" are usually trying to call attention away from their own privileged status and preferential treatment.
What needs to be realized that is that the right to believe is not -- or at least, should not be -- absolute. Why do we require children to stay in school until a certain age? Because we realize that society is injured by an undereducated populace. Ignorance is not a fundamental right. (Although it could be argued that it is a "fundamentalist rite.")
Do the Boy Scouts have the right to believe that homosexuality is a sin? Well, I suppose so. Should they have the right to drill this foolishness into the minds of children without reality having a shot at equal or greater time? No, I don't believe so They can say what they want, but I think the Boy Scouts should be required to let any gay or atheist Scout remain in the troop unless he proves himself a troublemaker, like any straight Christian Scout. The fact these boys are just as honest and decent as anyone else will soon teach the children that this anti-gay rhetoric is founded upon a lie.
Just as I believe a child's death in a snake-handling church should be treated as First Degree Murder (the parents planned to take the child there, after all), so do I believe that the facts of homosexuality's probable genetic roots (and, for that matter, evolution as the most likely explanation for our presence on earth) should be as basic to education as mathematics, the alphabet, and the earth being round. We force our children to learn math; why not science?
All of this will never fly. Too many people would raise money and appeal to emotions and thump their chests while saluting the flag and kissing a bible for that to ever happen. But there are things people of integrity can do to try and rescue the Boy Scouts from turning into a mixture of Hitler Youth and the John Birch Society.

My nephew is eight years old. He was in Cub Scouts, but had very little interest in it; he preferred to be at home watching television and playing with his toys. Although a part of me thinks it would do him a lot of good to be in an environment of having to share with others (he being an only child, he still has some trouble grasping that), another part of me is glad he's not that interested in Scouting. Growing up in this town, with his extended family and his parents' church setting, is going to make it hard enough for him to keep anything resembling an open mind. The last thing he needs is to have yet another authority figure, yet another peer group, encouraging him to pick on people who are different from himself and let others do his thinking for him.

(Please visit the online Petition to the Boy Scouts of America and the >Scouting For All page if you oppose the BSA's policies in this regard.)

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