ACLU remains staunchly anti-Boy Scout

[Amelia]

ACLU remains staunchly anti-Boy Scout

January 17, 2005

The Daily Mining Gazette

The world's most feared military, facing a whining foe outside a U.S. courtroom, recently surrendered faster than the French army. The issue: Military unit sponsorships of Boy Scout troops, a long tradition challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of its long hate campaign against the Scouts.

The ACLU doesn't care for the Boy Scouts for their policy against practicing homosexuals in their ranks, as well as their fealty to God and country.

Pentagon lawyers readily agreed to the ACLU's demand, without so much as firing a legal brief, to "warn" military bases against sponsoring Boy Scout units. The Scouts will continue to have access to bases, as other civic and volunteer groups do, but the ACLU is unlikely to stop at merely ending sponsorships.

The big enchilada of this particular legal campaign is to deny the Scouts access to all military facilities, specifically including Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, where the national Boy Scout Jamboree is held.

The American Legion, in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asks a pertinent question: "Why is it that the rank of Eagle Scout is an attribute high-sought in candidates for the military academies, but soon will be unwelcome on military bases?"

The Boy Scouts may be needed more today on military bases than at any time in recent memory. Our nation's all-volunteer, career military comes with families attached. Under the policy so easily agreed to by Pentagon bureaucrats, the sons of good men and women now on station in Iraq, Afghanistan and other trouble spots cannot have their Scout troops sponsored by their parents' military units.

That's just wrong.

Military families need to be able to freely participate in organizations like the Scouts, and they undergo enough hardship during wartime without having Pentagon bureaucrats lend a helping hand to the harassers at the ACLU.

Rumsfeld should overrule the Pentagon's lawyers and tell the ACLU to take its anti-Scout obsessions elsewhere.