Boy Scouts of America's Values Affect Membership Criteria
According to its mission statement, the Boy Scouts of America seeks "to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law". All members are required, as a condition of membership, to promise to uphold and obey both of these pledges. The texts of the BSA's Scout Oath and Scout Law for Boy Scouting have remained unchanged since they were approved in 1911, and every member agrees to follow them on their application form.
Scout Oath
On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.
Scout Law A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
Spirituality has been an integral part of the international Scouting movement since its inception. As early as 1908, Scouting founder Robert Baden-Powell wrote in the first Scout handbook that, "No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws."
Religious organizations host/sponsor over 60% of the approximately 123,000 Scouting units in the United States and use the Scouting program as part of their youth ministration. Officials from various religious organizations—including the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches—are included on the BSA National Executive Board, its Advisory Council, and the BSA Religious Relationships Committee.
In reciting the Scout Oath, Scouts promise to do their duty to God and to be morally straight; the Scout Law holds that a Scout is clean and reverent. As early as 1978, the Boy Scouts of America circulated a memorandum among national executive staff stating that they held it was not appropriate for homosexuals to hold leadership positions in BSA. Similarly, since at least 1985, the BSA has interpreted the Scout Oath and Law as being incompatible with agnosticism and atheism. In both instances, the organization asserted that it was not a new policy to oppose and disfavor atheism, agnosticism and homosexuality, but rather, it was just enforcing long-held policies which had never been published or publicly challenged.
Read more about this topic: Boy Scouts Of America Membership Controversies
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“Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn,”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. Little Boy Blue (l. 1–2)
“it pleaseth me when I see through the meadows
The tents and pavilions set up, and great joy have I
When I see o’er the campana knights armed and horses arrayed.
And it pleaseth me when the scouts set in flight the folk with
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And it pleaseth me when I see coming together after them an host of
armed men.”
—Bertrans De Born (fl. 12th century)
“It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“With all of its bad influences, T.V. is not to be feared.... It can be a fairly safe laboratory for confronting, seeing through, and thus being immunized against unhealthy values so as to be “in the world but not of it.””
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)
“We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice—however much we might desire it.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)