Posted on 11/19/2007 1:14:56 AM PST by Nick Thimmesch
PHILADELPHIA -- This may be the last free Thanksgiving dinner for the Boy Scouts of Philadelphia.
Citing a local 1982 "fair practices" law, the city solicitor has given the Scouts until Dec. 3 to renounce its policy of excluding homosexuals or forfeit the grand, Beaux-Arts building it has rented from the city for $1 a year since 1928.
"While we respect the right of the Boy Scouts to prohibit participation in its activities by homosexuals," the solicitor, Romulo Diaz, said last week in an interview, "we will not subsidize that discrimination by passing on the costs to the people of Philadelphia."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Do you suppose the city is expecting donors to pay this so they can make some quick money?
yes but not every gay person molests kids and they’re going to complain they didn’t do anything ‘wrong’
Why don’t they leave it to the people and let them vote. I would accept whatever the people vote for. I think that is how democracy works.
I don't understand that sentence.
My point is that I agree with the Scouts' actions, but we need to deal in facts, not emotional gaybashing rhetoric. I don't give a damn what gays do, but they have no right to dispense their hoohah if the Scouts don't want it. That doesn't mean they've molested children.
Because there are still innocent souls to save and salvage.
I just got back from a Scout Camp-borie this weekend with my son and 1,400 other scouts. It was extremely impressive. We had something like 80 different workshops and seminars throughout the camp grounds. Classes in the woods including Science, Geology, Engineering and Handyman for the younger groups to Blacksmithing (it was amazing to see them set up a primative yet effective Iron Works on the grounds) to teach them metalworking.
I think it provided an exceptional formative experience for each of those kids. It was very impressive! They even had self improvement classes for the adults. I didn't take any myself. I'm not a "fixer-upper", I'm more like a "complete rehab". ; ) In truth, I wanted to check out the other classes the kids were taking. I saw them working on truck engines in the middle of dirt covered camp sites, fashioning wooden crafts, learning about the dangers of drugs from Police officers who volunteered as leaders, and I had to go watch the black smithing - that was just so cool!
And the grounds there? Florida woods. Perfect day. Trails upon trails leading through our sub-tropical state.
Are the Scout right to ban homosexual scout leaders? Let me tell you, I sure as hell wouldn't let my son set foot on those grounds if they changed their policy. That camp would become a "swingers" resort overnight.
As it is, it was an amazing learning experience that the kids will remember and look forward to bringing their own children to when they grow up.
Man, I must have walked several miles through those woods. Thank God I wore my hiking boots, they felt like slippers. One mother I saw walk by going the other direction brought her son in proper gear but she was wearing short heals. I wouldn't want to be around for the screams of agony when she attempted to peel those away from her blistered skin Saturday night.
If a normal man approves of this, it is because he has been brainswashed by the moral left news media, vulgar entertainment and/or the Government School Monopoly.
Even if the sex pervert does not physically molest a boy, the sex pervert still gets to groom the boy to be more inclined to become more socially liberal and accepting in his views about the abomination of the sodomites.
The Government School brainwashing pushes the sodomite view.
Life is not a game, boys are not fodder to be fed to social liberals and their aggressive surge to influence young people to abandon virtue and morality.
These perverted social liberals want to sew up any remaining, surviving area of conservative morality, any remaining area of decency that is not yet controlled by the moral liberals who work hand in hand with the liberal extremists who run the Government Public School Monopoly.
” City of Brotherly Love “... literally
That's because all their law suits are paid for with our tax money - something that should be stopped because I doubt they'd 'care' about anything if they had to come up with the money themselves
BFD. So be it. We don't need no city of "brotherly love" as Philadelphia must now define it. We don't need your PC either. Stuff it. OH yea, and I'm not from Philadelphia but I feel this way about any entity who thinks they can coerce the BSA into caving on their moral beliefs.
Filthy disgusting scum. This is what happens when you elect Democrats.
Do you know the word “potential”. It’s the principle of the thing and our kids don’t need the immoral exposure. They don’t need the risk. They don’t need to learn one single thing from queers. Period. End of statement.
“If there’s been no abuse, why are people saying they don’t want scout leaders taking boys into the woods to molest them?”
There have been cases of abuse. In each case the leaders were gay and had not admitted it to the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts is a traditional organization based on Christian values. Allowing gays to be leaders tells our children that they should use this person as an example.
Heterosexual is normal and that is the message we should be giving our children. Its also much healthier for a persons physical and mental well being.
“Are there any reports of gay scout leaders dispensing their agenda to the scouts?”
Just by being gay they set an example. The majority of communication is done through non-verbals.
Priests have shown more than potential to molest kids, so I guess we should just ban all of them, by your bizarre logic.
In the country I live in, we can't charge them or otherwise deal with them because of "potential" violations.
Besides, you're acting as if I'm advocating letting them in. I am completely in support of the Scouts, but I wish we weren't such a scaredy bunch in this party. If the Scouts want to ban people with green eyes, it's their right, but they surely wouldn't say it's because people with green eyes have the potential to do anything.
When did we all become such freaking scared old ladies?
The Scouts can do anything they want, I am just curious about the reasoning behind it. As for basing things on "normal," let's be honest, there are plenty of heterosexuals who beat their wives and kill people, do drugs and embezzle.
This whole "non-verbal" thing is silly. Are your kids going to "turn gay" because they see a gay person?
The Scouts can and should do as they wish, but these "reasons" offered here are weak.
“Are there any reports of gay scout leaders dispensing their agenda to the scouts?”
I don’t even want to do an extensive search after a simple search brought up these...
On February 13, 2003, a former Wisconsin Boy Scout leader was convicted of 20 counts of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 65 years in jail.
The judge said he wanted Gary Radloff to die behind bars for his crimes against children. Judge Patrick Haughney told Radloff: “Absent a serial killer, this case doesn’t get any more serious because what we have here is a serial child molester. Mr. Radloff is evil. Mr Raloff is vile. He is a child molester who ran a house of evil. I intend this to be a life sentence.”
Radloff had been convicted of child molestation in Illinois in the 1980s as a Boy Scout leader, but served only two years. He moved to Wisconsin and was charged last year with molesting three boys in his Scout troop.
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Monticello - For 15 years, Ronald Occhipinti was a Boy Scout troop leader in Queens.
But instead of guiding the boys in his charge, Occhipinti sexually abused at least one of them. The victim was 11 when the abuse started in Queens and in Sullivan County.
“You shouldn’t have done it. It ruined our lives,” cried one of several boys from the back row of a Medina, Ohio, courtroom last week.
The New York Police Department’s Special Victims Unit arrested Occhipinti in August. He admitted molesting two boys in his Scout troop, one at his home and one at a Little Neck church where the troop met.
Occhipinti pleaded guilty yesterday to first-degree course of sexual conduct against a child, second-degree aggravated sexual abuse and use of a child in a sexual performance, all felonies. Last week, he pleaded guilty in Queens to sexual-conduct felonies. He will get 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced on June 12 in Queens and June 13 in Sullivan.
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Michael Maggy, 35, a former Boy Scout leader, had just pleaded guilty to rape and sexual battery, and the poignant comments from his victims were brought home by a sentence of life in prison issued by Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher J. Collier.
“I know what I have done to you,” Maggy said to his scout victims, as reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “I can’t apologize enough.” Confessing that he too had been sexually molested as a boy, Maggy said he had lacked the courage to seek help.
“I did not get counseling or even talk about it. Look where it got me,”
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Justice Ignazio Ruvolo of the First District Court of Appeals in San Francisco recently ruled that the Boy Scouts of America should be held responsible for a Southern California scout’s sexual molestation at the hands of a pedophile scout leader. Why? In making his case that the Scouting organization — despite a comprehensive national program to prevent sexual abuse — should have done even more to protect kids from pedophiles, the judge said, “It should be reasonably foreseeable to the Scouts that a child participating in Scouting might fall prey to a sexual predator.”
Attorney Charles A. Bonner, representing the victim who had been molested back in 1991 by his assistant scoutmaster, Jorge Paz, was even more direct. He said BSA national leaders know that “the organization attracts pedophiles like a magnet attracts metal.”
________________________________________
Despite the BSA training and rules, the incidents of reported child molestation have been on the rise. The scouting organization attributes the increase to greater awareness because of the training given to boys and to a record number of boys in the program — about 5 million. BSA statistics and various media reports over the past 20 years show a near-tripling of sexual abuse cases — from about 70 cases a year then to about 200 annually now.
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# FBI waiting when alleged sex offender shows up (March 9, 2001, Atlanta Constitution) When Robert Landrum Shirley walked into a video arcade in Roswell Saturday afternoon (March 3) he was looking for sex with a teen-age boy, authorities said. Instead, the former Boy Scout leader found the FBI’s Innocent Images Task Force.
According to Atlanta Area Council BSA spokeswoman Lisa Dukes, Shirley, 42, was a Boy Scout leader from at least 1985 to 1990. That year allegations surfaced about him, and the Boy Scouts determined he was no longer eligible to participate, Dukes said. A young boy in Cobb County had complained to his church about inappropriate behavior on Shirley’s part. The Boy Scouts passed the information on to the Department of Family and Children Services.
# Ex-Scout leader pleads guilty to sex charges (April 5, 2001 - Ottawa Citizen)
Timothy John Parris, 36, who plied two of his teen-age cadets with alcohol as they watched pornographic videos and engaged in sexual games, pleaded guilty to sex charges. He admitted to one count each of sexual exploitation and invitation to sexual touching.
One of Parris’s victims held his girlfriend’s hand and wept as he looked on from the rear of the courtroom. Parris is the former leader of the 26th Sea Venturers, a branch of Scouts Canada.
# Former Boy Scout assistant charged with molesting scouts 15 years ago (April 13, 2001 - Ohio News)
Dale T. Brant, 38, was indicted on 23 counts of third-degree sexual assault. He was arrested at his New Manchester home by West Virginia State Police. In 2000, two men said Brant repeatedly molested them between April 1985 and October 1986, when they were both 12 years old, said Hancock County Prosecutor James Davis.
# Scout leader’s sentence criticized (April 25, 2001 - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) Relatives of three young boys who were bound and physically abused by a Boy Scout leader on an overnight campout said they were appalled by the light sentence imposed on the defendant in a Westmoreland County, Pa., courtroom.
John T. Levendosky II, the assistant scoutmaster who pleaded guilty two months ago to 18 charges stemming from the incident and has been in jail about 10 1/2 months, will be eligible for parole in about a month and a half under the sentence handed down by Common Pleas Judge William J. Ober. Ober ordered Levendosky, of Derry Borough, to a maximum of two years in the Westmoreland County Prison, giving him credit for the time he has spent in prison since his arrest.
# Scouts leader charged with sex crimes (May 2, 2001 Evansville Courier & Press/AP).
Boy Scout troop leader Steve Woodard, 41, of Muncie, Ind., accused of molesting three brothers, has been charged with child molesting and sexual misconduct with a minor. Woodard remained in the Delaware County jail Wednesday morning (May 2) with bond set at $80,000.
Two of the alleged victims had been members of Woodard’s Scout troop, based out of Riverside United Methodist Church, authorities said. Woodard was suspended Tuesday by the Boy Scouts of America, police said.
Investigators said scouting officials had met with troop members to inform them of the arrest. One of the victims, now in his late teens, told investigators he had been molested by Woodard as many as 100 times over the past several years.
# Defendant: Sex wasn’t abusive (May 10, 2001 - Orange County Register)
The tall man in the dark-blue suit made his opening statement to jurors Wednesday. “I’m a pedophile, he admitted.
“I’m not going to stand here and say these acts didn’t occur - because they did,” said a well-groomed and articulate Kenneth Teague, representing himself in a lurid sex-abuse trial in Santa Ana, Calif. ... It has to do with “courage and kindness and trust and love,” said Teague, a former computer consultant in Irvine.
Hardly, said Deputy District Attorney Randy Payne, who painted Teague as a manipulative opportunist who abused his positions in the Boy Scouts, Big Brothers and foster-parent programs to seduce vulnerable boys.
# Former Scout leader guilty of sex charge (May 23, 2001 - Ottawa Citizen)
A former Ottawa assistant Scout leader admitted yesterday to asking a 14-year-old troop member to re-enact a pornographic film with him. Michael Dickey, 25, who was expected to go to trial yesterday on one count of sexual assault and three counts of sexual exploitation, pleaded guilty to one of the sexual exploitation charges.
The former assistant Sea Venturers leader, who quit the scouting movement in 1997, and another leader, Timothy Parris, were arrested in May 1999 after two boys complained to police about an incident that occurred the same year Dickey quit. Parris pleaded guilty in April to one count of sexual exploitation and one count of invitation to sexual touching. He’s scheduled to be sentenced next month.
# Scout Leader Faces Boy Sex Rap (May 23, 2001 - New York Daily News)
An Upper East Side scoutmaster was accused of sex abuse yesterday by a former Boy Scout who claims he was assaulted dozens of times in the troop leader’s Manhattan apartment and on campouts and overnight trips. The allegations were made in a $50 million lawsuit that targets scoutmaster Jerrold Schwartz, who has led Troop 666 at the prestigious St. Bartholomew’s Church for two decades.
“Jerrold Schwartz is a pedophile. We brought this lawsuit to stop him from having contact with children,” the former Scout’s attorney, Michael Dowd, said yesterday. Schwartz, 41, declined to comment.
The Greater New York Council of the Boy Scouts of America announced later he had been fired as scoutmaster.
# Judge denies pleas to close molest trial (June 19, 2001 - Boston Herald)
One boy’s post-traumatic stress is so bad, he has not eaten, slept or socialized normally in months. Another boy punches holes in walls as he struggles with his confusion and anger. Several of the youngsters fear being labeled as gay if they are even identified as victims of accused serial pedophile Christopher J. Reardon.
Those are among the accounts of anguished parents who wrote letters hoping to persuade a judge yesterday to close the courtroom when their children testify against Reardon in his upcoming trial.
``My son has been relentlessly tormented at school by boys who knew he was in Boy Scouts and therefore suspected he might be one of Reardon’s victims,’’ wrote the mother of one boy, now 12 years old, who Reardon is accused of molesting while videotaping the act.
NAMBLA Can Hardly Wait
Finally, there is this gem from the pedophile group North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).
In 1992, NAMBLA sent a letter to Ben Love, then chief Scout executive of the Boy Scouts of America. The following letter is an excerpt from NAMBLA’s Bulletin and written by its co-secretary:
“Dear Mr. Love,
At its 16th membership conference, held in Chicago, August 7-9, 1992, the North American Man/Boy Love Association unanimously adopted the following resolution: ‘NAMBLA calls on the Boy Scouts of America to cease its discrimination against openly gay or lesbian persons in the appointment of its scout masters. This will permit more of those individuals who genuinely wish to serve boys to do so.’ I feel especially honored to have been asked to alert you of this resolution... I have also been a scout and scout leader and share with so many in NAMBLA affection for the movement. We recognize, of course, that the action for which we call is inevitable. What a great added contribution your organization will make possible to all the boys and girls who participate in it when you take this step. May it be taken in the near future. We share a common mission - to bring greater understanding and light and purpose to the young as they grow. We invite you to join with us in cherishing individual integrity, and in seeking the opportunity for every boy and girl in our country to find their own truth. We encourage you to help every person associated with your organization to be able to express those values from themselves which to them represent for themselves the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As we work together toward these ends Light will guide our way. We express these sentiments most respectfully, Very Cordially, Lehand Stevenson, C0-Recording Secretary, NAMBLA.
Source: Lehand Stevenson, NAMBLA Bulletin, November 1992.
Thanks--I think--for the info.
Your post is a model for the others who seemed to have trouble giving a straight answer to a simple question.
Too bad the Philly officials--who I'm sure have that information and more on hand--can't seem to understand the Scouts' reasoning.
“The Scouts can do anything they want, I am just curious about the reasoning behind it. As for basing things on “normal,” let’s be honest, there are plenty of heterosexuals who beat their wives and kill people, do drugs and embezzle.”
You’re a glass half full kinda person aren’t you. Do you understand what normal means? There are plenty of heterosexuals that are fine people who contribute a great deal to society. These are the people we should have our children model. Your average scout leader is one of those models, not perfect but trying.
“This whole “non-verbal” thing is silly. Are your kids going to “turn gay” because they see a gay person?”
Silly? Why is it silly? Do I expect them to turn gay because they see a gay person? No, but I also don’t expect a gay person to be a positive role model.
“The Scouts can and should do as they wish, but these “reasons” offered here are weak.”
Why should the Scouts allow gay leaders? Its always about the rights of the leader wanna be’s. What about the rights of the children and their parents? You pro-homosexual types only seem to care about yourselves.
Well, that didn't take long.
See my previous post.
When someone simply asks QUESTIONS around here, the illogical types can't simply admit they don't have facts--all they can do is smear.
Then someone else--the poster who posted those stats--schools 'em, and then the idiots look like what they are--hate-filled, thought-free drones.
Can you even READ?
From my previous posts on this thread:
"The Scouts can do anything they want... The Scouts can and should do as they wish... Too bad the Philly officials--who I'm sure have that information and more on hand--can't seem to understand the Scouts' reasoning.... I am completely in support of the Scouts... My point is that I agree with the Scouts' actions... they have no right to dispense their hoohah if the Scouts don't want it...."
I know it's difficult to deal in facts, and when your own lack of intelligence is brought out, all you can do is smear people by calling them "You pro-homosexual types" because they have the audacity to ask for FACTS and information about a thread topic, we've lost the right to call ourselves the party for adults.
“Well, that didn’t take long.”
You are the one bashing the Boy Scouts and pro-heterosexuals for their stance.
“When someone simply asks QUESTIONS around here, the illogical types can’t simply admit they don’t have facts—all they can do is smear.”
You weren’t questioning, you were criticizing.
“Then someone else—the poster who posted those stats—schools ‘em, and then the idiots look like what they are—hate-filled, thought-free drones.”
Our non-acceptance of the gay lifestyle does not equate with hate-free or thought free. The pro-gay advocates always seem to pull that card with anyone who disagrees with them.
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