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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“I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen—but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!”
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“The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.”
—Steven Levy, U.S. writer. Hackers, ch. 2, “The Hacker Ethic,” pp. 27-33, Anchor Press, Doubleday (1984)