Boy Scouts, Reversing Century-Old Stance,
Will Allow Transgender Boys
BY
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Reversing its stance of more than a century, the Boy Scouts of America
said on Monday that the group would begin accepting members based on
the gender listed on their application, paving the way for transgender
boys to join the organization.
“For
more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America, along with schools,
youth sports and other youth organizations, have ultimately deferred to
the information on an individual’s birth certificate to determine
eligibility for our single-gender programs,” the group said in a statement
on its website. “However, that approach is no longer sufficient as
communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently,
and these laws vary widely from state to state.”
The announcement, reported on Monday night by The Associated Press, reverses a policy that drew controversy late last year when a transgender boy in New Jersey was kicked out of the organization about a month after joining.
“After
weeks of significant conversations at all levels of our organization,
we realized that referring to birth certificates as the reference point
is no longer sufficient,” Michael Surbaugh, the Scouts’ chief executive,
said in a recorded statement on Monday.
The
announcement came amid a national debate over transgender rights, with
cities and states across the nation struggling with whether and how to
regulate gender identity in the workplace, in restrooms and at schools.
In recent years, the Boy Scouts of America has expanded rights for gay people. In 2013, the group ended its ban on openly gay youths participating in its activities. Two years later, the organization ended its ban on openly gay adult leaders.
Advocates for gay and transgender people who had pushed for changes in Boy Scouts’ policy praised Monday’s announcement.
“From
our perspective, they clearly did the right thing,” said Zach Wahls,
who co-founded Scouts for Equality, a nonprofit group that advocates for
stronger protections in the organization for gays and transgender
people. “My team and I knew that they were considering a policy change,
but we are both heartened and surprised by how quickly they moved to
change the situation.”
Last
year, in response to parent complaints, the Boy Scouts of America
removed an 8-year-old transgender boy from the Secaucus, N.J., Cub Scout
pack he had joined just about a month earlier, according to The Record, a newspaper in northern New Jersey.
“It
made me mad,” Joe Maldonado, the boy, told the newspaper. “I had a sad
face, but I wasn’t crying. I’m way more angry than sad. My identity is a
boy. If I was them, I would let every person in the world go in. It’s
right to do.”
Joe’s
case may have been the first in which a transgender boy was ejected
from the program, Mr. Wahls, a former Eagle Scout, said.
When
Mr. Wahls helped found Scouts for Equality in 2012, the Boy Scouts of
America did not yet allow gay scouts or leaders, and “there was zero
conversation about transgender issues.”
While
he was encouraged by what appeared to be the group’s quick decision on
accepting transgender scouts, Scouts for Equality plans to push for a
more formal policy, Mr. Wahls said.
“We want to make sure that they work with experts who have experience with transgender youth and youth programs,” he said.
The
Boy Scouts of America claim nearly 2.3 million members between the ages
of 7 and 21, and the group counts many notable figures among its alumni
and volunteers.
One
of them, Rex W. Tillerson, President Trump’s nominee for secretary of
state, was involved in getting the organization to accept gay scouts and
leaders. He was the national president of the Boy Scouts of America
from 2010 to 2011 and served on its executive board in 2013 when it voted to lift the ban on gay scouts.
That
decision came after years of reluctance from the organization and a
wrenching internal debate that involved threats from some conservative
parents and volunteers that they would quit. When the ban on gay leaders
was reversed in 2015, the Mormon Church, the largest sponsor of
scouting units, briefly threatened to leave the group as well.
______________________________________________________
There was a time when the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) spent money fighting a lawsuit brought by a girl who wanted to be a “boy” scout. The organization won that battle. Now it has lost its mind, deciding to let a girl join its ranks simply because she claims to be a boy.
The BSA will now judge applicants based on their “gender identity” and not, as had been the policy, based on the sex indicated on their birth certificate. Because birth certificates are, as Barack Obama proved, so yesterday.
As CNN reported, the birth-certificate “‘approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state,’ BSA spokeswoman Effie Delimarkos said in a statement Monday.”
The Girl Scouts had already capitulated some years ago, allowing a boy masquerading as a girl to join their organization.
CNN further explains that the BSA’s collapse “comes a few months after an 8-year-old Cub Scout in New Jersey accused the organization of expelling him for being transgender. The Boy Scouts did not specifically cite the New Jersey case in its statement. But Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh acknowledged the group recently had been ‘challenged by a very complex topic ... the issue of gender identity.’"
This brings to mind the apocryphal saying, “Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.” Of course, the psychology causing an individual to believe he’s a member of the opposite sex, a different species (“species dysphoria”), or Napoleon may be complex. The psychology causing CNN to, as is de rigueur among mainstream media now, refer to children such as the expelled N.J. Cub Scout as “him” may also be complex. But the simple fact of the matter is that the child is a girl. There’s nothing complex about that.
Meanwhile, girls who actually claim they’re girls again want to be Boy Scouts. One of them, 15-year-old Sydney Ireland, posted a petition at Change.org stating, in part, “I cannot change my gender to fit the Boy Scouts’ standards.” No? I guess poor Sydney didn’t get the memo.
I don’t know if such rejection of the Made-up Sexual Status (MUSS — “transgender”) agenda qualifies Ireland as a hater; she’s right in a way, however, since by “gender” she means “sex.” As former “transsexual” Alan Finch said in 2004, “You fundamentally can't change sex.... Transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists.”
Note that while most people identify the word “gender” with “sex,” psychologists define it as a person’s “perception” of what he is and say that this can be different from his “sex,” which is a biological classification.
And what do people perceive? The list of “genders” grows like the national debt, with the literally scores of them including designations such as Agender, Bigender, Cis, Gender Fluid, Genderqueer, Pangender, and Neutrois.
Maybe this is why it sounds so “complex” to Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh, but let’s cut through the noise. The thesis behind the MUSS (“transgender”) agenda states that, put simply, a person could be a woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice versa.
The idea is that at issue is not a psychological problem, but a biological one. But is there any proof of this? As I wrote last year:
Really, the BSA should just get ahead of the curve and rename itself
the Gender Fluid Scouts. After all, the notion of a “boy” is so passé.
Why bother following the spirit of the age when you can lead it? Aren’t
the scouts about leadership?
The BSA development is instructive. First, it illustrates how political revolutions (which Donald Trump may be ushering in) can do little to restore the culture, whose moral decay continues apace.
Second, a beneficiary of the BSA’s collapse may be Trail Life USA, an alternative, Christian scouting group launched three years ago after the BSA decided to admit openly homosexual boys. This is, of course, the market at work, but it also underlines how fractured our civilization has become.
There was no need for such alternatives many decades ago because, by and large, people’s sense of virtue was explicitly the same. Today, however, with our emotion-guided decision-making causing millions of people to march to the beat of a million different drummers, there’s less and less we can unite around.
As for the BSA, along with its name, maybe its oath needs some tweaking as well. Scouts could be told that you should keep yourself “physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight — or whatever works for you.”
______________________________________________________
LTRP Note: For 15 years, Lighthouse Trails has had the motto “Bringing light to areas of darkness.” One of those areas (which we call our Sensitive Issues) is bringing to light the reality of child sexual abuse. We believe that the sexual molestation of children is part of what we call “the Death Religion,” which includes evolution, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, mysticism, pedophilia, and antisemitism. All of these lead to one place – death, and the author of death is our adversary, Satan. We have published three books thus far on this topic: The Color of Pain (by Gregory Reid), Laughter Calls Me (by Catherine Brown), and Seducers Among Our Children (by Sergeant Patrick Crough) and carry a number of other resources like these.
Over the past couple years, the Boy Scouts of America have passed resolutions allowing practicing homosexuals (and now transgenders) to actively lead and/or participate in the clubs. What the organization has done is put countless young boys in harm’s way. We believe it is just a matter of time before our society says it is not a crime to engage in sexual activity with a child. With every world empire in history that came to that resolution, it was the last resolution they ever made. After that, their empire ended.
The following two excerpts by Greg Reid from his book The Color of Pain illustrates what happens to a young boy when he is molested. Greg writes from personal experience. While some may find it difficult to read such an account, it is wrong to bury our heads in the sand and pretend this is not really happening to boys and girls across this nation. And the Boy Scouts have now made it possible for that epidemic to grow bigger than ever.
As Patrick Crough says in his book, adults are supposed to be the shepherd’s of children. We have a responsibility to watch over and protect them.
“Letter to the Molester”
By Greg Reid
bigstockphoto.com
To Whoever You Are:
Your name doesn’t matter, for to me, you were just a stranger in a Volkswagen who gave me a ride. And to you, I was just a number, a cute fourteen-year-old anonymous kid, one of God knows how many.
I think about it a lot. Even though you weren’t the first to molest me, you probably did more damage than most. At fourteen, I was just beginning to explore my sexuality, and I was vulnerable. All my sexual antennas were active, but then you knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you picked kids like me. We were easy prey; we were little enough to feel scared and overpowered by you, old enough to sexually respond to what you did.
I hated you, and I have forgiven you. Because to not forgive you meant I always lived for you, thought about you, lived in the darkness of what you did and longed for vengeance. Five years after you raped me, I saw you while I was driving, and pressed the accelerator to the floor to kill you. You were still driving the same Volkswagen. Only God’s grace pulled back my foot and let you live. And then I knew that you bound me still. And so I forgave not because it was rational but because it was killing me, not because you deserve it but because I needed to let it go. Forgive means “give forth” and so I gave back the chains you put me in. I don’t hate you anymore. I feel nothing at all, but sadness, for what you took from me—that I can never reclaim my adolescence.
I do pray for you for repentance, if possible. And if not, for imprisonment, not to punish you (for you must loath your every breath) but to stop you. Because if you raped me, I wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last.
I pray for all the kids you raped like me. You cannot know what you took, what you destroyed. The walking wounded see your face, feel your evil touch, and blame themselves.
I wish I could tell them it wasn’t them. You knew exactly how it’s done. They were powerless, and paralyzed, and afraid.
They probably still are.
“What Being Molested Cost Me”
By Greg Reid
The cost to a kid who gets molested is higher than most people know. It’s too easy to minimize the damage by saying, “It’s just one of those things,” or “Get over it.” Sexual violation is a violent thing even when it’s not violent.
It takes so much inside. After many years, I’ve taken notice of the losses (much of which has been healed and restored), and I want to tell you about it so you’ll know.
It cost me my childhood. Repeated molestation blocked my memories, and what I did remember was covered with a haze of physical illness, stalking fear, repeat nightmares, and deep loneliness.
It cost me my ability to trust. I resented authority and feared adults so much I wouldn’t go anyplace like a public rest room or swimming pool locker room because I’d get sick from the fear of what might happen.
It cost me my ability to be spontaneous. I kept such rigid control over my emotions, my body and my mind, that I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t play, and being around kids who could made me feel sullen, angry, depressed, alone, left out.
It cost me my sanity. Shortly after the initial abuses, I was in a complete emotional dead zone; and one night, as I sat alone in a chair, my mind filled with filth and blasphemy, and tears streamed down my face, because I loved God and I couldn’t stop this mental rape, and I just snapped after several days of this, and I started cursing, and smoking, and drinking, and I told God to give up on me because I was evil.
I was eleven.
It cost me my education potential. I was a brilliant child. Being molested cost me my ability to think without confusion, trance outs, and frustration. I couldn’t concentrate. I could have been a straight A Valedictorian. Instead, by the time I finished High School, I was taking four basic classes and barely passed.
It cost me my identity. Being molested created such sexual and emotional confusion that I was an old man before I was fifteen and still a boy at thirty. I felt numb and removed, like I was not there, just a piece of property for others to use and discard.
It cost me my adolescence. Being molested made me afraid of adults, men, women, crowds, public places, challenges, fights and almost everything else including being scared to death I was gay and scared of all my emotions including anger and joy. I couldn’t date, I didn’t go to the prom, and alcohol was my only “friend.” Being a kid is screwed up and scary enough, but I carried enough guilt and fear to take down ten normal adults.
It cost me time. Being molested started me running, and I ran and kept going until I crashed in my late twenties, and then it cost me time in recovering, facing hard truth, and healing.
It cost me family. Being molested crippled my heart enough to destroy any potential marriage or children.
God has restored most of what was taken, and more. But you need to know being molested is not a “get over it” thing. It’s an evil robber whose damage goes deep and keeps taking until we can face it and start to heal.
______________________________________________________
Boy Scouts’ Moral Collapse:
Will Allow “Trans” Girls in Ranks
BY SELWYN DUKE
SEE: http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/item/25270-boy-scouts-moral-collapse-will-allow-trans-girls-in-ranks;
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
It’s the Boy Scouts — or something like that, anyway.There was a time when the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) spent money fighting a lawsuit brought by a girl who wanted to be a “boy” scout. The organization won that battle. Now it has lost its mind, deciding to let a girl join its ranks simply because she claims to be a boy.
The BSA will now judge applicants based on their “gender identity” and not, as had been the policy, based on the sex indicated on their birth certificate. Because birth certificates are, as Barack Obama proved, so yesterday.
As CNN reported, the birth-certificate “‘approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state,’ BSA spokeswoman Effie Delimarkos said in a statement Monday.”
The Girl Scouts had already capitulated some years ago, allowing a boy masquerading as a girl to join their organization.
CNN further explains that the BSA’s collapse “comes a few months after an 8-year-old Cub Scout in New Jersey accused the organization of expelling him for being transgender. The Boy Scouts did not specifically cite the New Jersey case in its statement. But Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh acknowledged the group recently had been ‘challenged by a very complex topic ... the issue of gender identity.’"
This brings to mind the apocryphal saying, “Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.” Of course, the psychology causing an individual to believe he’s a member of the opposite sex, a different species (“species dysphoria”), or Napoleon may be complex. The psychology causing CNN to, as is de rigueur among mainstream media now, refer to children such as the expelled N.J. Cub Scout as “him” may also be complex. But the simple fact of the matter is that the child is a girl. There’s nothing complex about that.
Meanwhile, girls who actually claim they’re girls again want to be Boy Scouts. One of them, 15-year-old Sydney Ireland, posted a petition at Change.org stating, in part, “I cannot change my gender to fit the Boy Scouts’ standards.” No? I guess poor Sydney didn’t get the memo.
I don’t know if such rejection of the Made-up Sexual Status (MUSS — “transgender”) agenda qualifies Ireland as a hater; she’s right in a way, however, since by “gender” she means “sex.” As former “transsexual” Alan Finch said in 2004, “You fundamentally can't change sex.... Transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists.”
Note that while most people identify the word “gender” with “sex,” psychologists define it as a person’s “perception” of what he is and say that this can be different from his “sex,” which is a biological classification.
And what do people perceive? The list of “genders” grows like the national debt, with the literally scores of them including designations such as Agender, Bigender, Cis, Gender Fluid, Genderqueer, Pangender, and Neutrois.
Maybe this is why it sounds so “complex” to Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh, but let’s cut through the noise. The thesis behind the MUSS (“transgender”) agenda states that, put simply, a person could be a woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice versa.
The idea is that at issue is not a psychological problem, but a biological one. But is there any proof of this? As I wrote last year:
What physiological markers will the
physician look for to verify that I truly am, legitimately,
“transgender,” suffering with a supposed brain/body incongruence? Don’t
feel bad not knowing.
There isn’t a so-called expert alive who could answer the question.
There is no brain scan for gender dysphoria. There is no genetic test. There is no hormonal test. There are no physiological markers of any kind.
Yet on the basis of “strong and persistent feelings of cross-gender
identification” — and on that basis alone — psychiatrists can and do
refer patients for the mutilation known as “gender-reassignment surgery”
(GRS). And on that basis alone, doctors may recommend that a young
child be allowed to live as a member of the opposite sex. It’s no
different from telling a cardiologist you feel certain you have heart
disease and, without performing tests to confirm the diagnosis, his
saying, “Oh, have the feelings been strong, persistent and extant for
longer than six months? Okay, well, then I’ll cut open your chest and do
a bypass.”
But it’s a brave new world, where identity is reality. Thus, why draw
lines based on biology at all? Why can’t a man such as 54-year-old
“Stefonknee” Wolscht, who claims to be a six-year-old girl (video
below), join the Girl Scouts? Inclusiveness, right?The BSA development is instructive. First, it illustrates how political revolutions (which Donald Trump may be ushering in) can do little to restore the culture, whose moral decay continues apace.
Second, a beneficiary of the BSA’s collapse may be Trail Life USA, an alternative, Christian scouting group launched three years ago after the BSA decided to admit openly homosexual boys. This is, of course, the market at work, but it also underlines how fractured our civilization has become.
There was no need for such alternatives many decades ago because, by and large, people’s sense of virtue was explicitly the same. Today, however, with our emotion-guided decision-making causing millions of people to march to the beat of a million different drummers, there’s less and less we can unite around.
As for the BSA, along with its name, maybe its oath needs some tweaking as well. Scouts could be told that you should keep yourself “physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight — or whatever works for you.”
______________________________________________________
Boy Scouts’ Rulings Put Boys at Risk (and “Letter to the Molester” and “What Being Molested Cost Me”)
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
LTRP Note: For 15 years, Lighthouse Trails has had the motto “Bringing light to areas of darkness.” One of those areas (which we call our Sensitive Issues) is bringing to light the reality of child sexual abuse. We believe that the sexual molestation of children is part of what we call “the Death Religion,” which includes evolution, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, mysticism, pedophilia, and antisemitism. All of these lead to one place – death, and the author of death is our adversary, Satan. We have published three books thus far on this topic: The Color of Pain (by Gregory Reid), Laughter Calls Me (by Catherine Brown), and Seducers Among Our Children (by Sergeant Patrick Crough) and carry a number of other resources like these.
Over the past couple years, the Boy Scouts of America have passed resolutions allowing practicing homosexuals (and now transgenders) to actively lead and/or participate in the clubs. What the organization has done is put countless young boys in harm’s way. We believe it is just a matter of time before our society says it is not a crime to engage in sexual activity with a child. With every world empire in history that came to that resolution, it was the last resolution they ever made. After that, their empire ended.
The following two excerpts by Greg Reid from his book The Color of Pain illustrates what happens to a young boy when he is molested. Greg writes from personal experience. While some may find it difficult to read such an account, it is wrong to bury our heads in the sand and pretend this is not really happening to boys and girls across this nation. And the Boy Scouts have now made it possible for that epidemic to grow bigger than ever.
As Patrick Crough says in his book, adults are supposed to be the shepherd’s of children. We have a responsibility to watch over and protect them.
“Letter to the Molester”
By Greg Reid
bigstockphoto.comYour name doesn’t matter, for to me, you were just a stranger in a Volkswagen who gave me a ride. And to you, I was just a number, a cute fourteen-year-old anonymous kid, one of God knows how many.
I think about it a lot. Even though you weren’t the first to molest me, you probably did more damage than most. At fourteen, I was just beginning to explore my sexuality, and I was vulnerable. All my sexual antennas were active, but then you knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you picked kids like me. We were easy prey; we were little enough to feel scared and overpowered by you, old enough to sexually respond to what you did.
I hated you, and I have forgiven you. Because to not forgive you meant I always lived for you, thought about you, lived in the darkness of what you did and longed for vengeance. Five years after you raped me, I saw you while I was driving, and pressed the accelerator to the floor to kill you. You were still driving the same Volkswagen. Only God’s grace pulled back my foot and let you live. And then I knew that you bound me still. And so I forgave not because it was rational but because it was killing me, not because you deserve it but because I needed to let it go. Forgive means “give forth” and so I gave back the chains you put me in. I don’t hate you anymore. I feel nothing at all, but sadness, for what you took from me—that I can never reclaim my adolescence.
I do pray for you for repentance, if possible. And if not, for imprisonment, not to punish you (for you must loath your every breath) but to stop you. Because if you raped me, I wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last.
I pray for all the kids you raped like me. You cannot know what you took, what you destroyed. The walking wounded see your face, feel your evil touch, and blame themselves.
I wish I could tell them it wasn’t them. You knew exactly how it’s done. They were powerless, and paralyzed, and afraid.
They probably still are.
“What Being Molested Cost Me”
By Greg Reid
The cost to a kid who gets molested is higher than most people know. It’s too easy to minimize the damage by saying, “It’s just one of those things,” or “Get over it.” Sexual violation is a violent thing even when it’s not violent.
It takes so much inside. After many years, I’ve taken notice of the losses (much of which has been healed and restored), and I want to tell you about it so you’ll know.
It cost me my childhood. Repeated molestation blocked my memories, and what I did remember was covered with a haze of physical illness, stalking fear, repeat nightmares, and deep loneliness.
It cost me my ability to trust. I resented authority and feared adults so much I wouldn’t go anyplace like a public rest room or swimming pool locker room because I’d get sick from the fear of what might happen.
It cost me my ability to be spontaneous. I kept such rigid control over my emotions, my body and my mind, that I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t play, and being around kids who could made me feel sullen, angry, depressed, alone, left out.
It cost me my sanity. Shortly after the initial abuses, I was in a complete emotional dead zone; and one night, as I sat alone in a chair, my mind filled with filth and blasphemy, and tears streamed down my face, because I loved God and I couldn’t stop this mental rape, and I just snapped after several days of this, and I started cursing, and smoking, and drinking, and I told God to give up on me because I was evil.
I was eleven.
It cost me my education potential. I was a brilliant child. Being molested cost me my ability to think without confusion, trance outs, and frustration. I couldn’t concentrate. I could have been a straight A Valedictorian. Instead, by the time I finished High School, I was taking four basic classes and barely passed.
It cost me my identity. Being molested created such sexual and emotional confusion that I was an old man before I was fifteen and still a boy at thirty. I felt numb and removed, like I was not there, just a piece of property for others to use and discard.
It cost me my adolescence. Being molested made me afraid of adults, men, women, crowds, public places, challenges, fights and almost everything else including being scared to death I was gay and scared of all my emotions including anger and joy. I couldn’t date, I didn’t go to the prom, and alcohol was my only “friend.” Being a kid is screwed up and scary enough, but I carried enough guilt and fear to take down ten normal adults.
It cost me time. Being molested started me running, and I ran and kept going until I crashed in my late twenties, and then it cost me time in recovering, facing hard truth, and healing.
It cost me family. Being molested crippled my heart enough to destroy any potential marriage or children.
God has restored most of what was taken, and more. But you need to know being molested is not a “get over it” thing. It’s an evil robber whose damage goes deep and keeps taking until we can face it and start to heal.