Talk:Controversies about the Boy Scouts of America/Sandbox

Massive Rewrite

So, I did a massive rewrite that I hope will answer both the POV concerns and the cleanup/stylistic concerns. I want to state off two things:

1. I tried SUPER hard to make this REALLY REALLY neutral.

2. I worked really hard on this, so please, even if you don't like parts, don't just like revert the whole think outright, or it'll give me an aneurysm.

Umm, despite it's different structure, almost everything's still there, more or less, just summarized a tad and moved around. As Jagz speculated it could, the page did, in fact, fit within the recommended maximum article size. Part of the way this brevity was accomplished was:

• I cut down the "Membership Inflation Scandal" to one sentence-- just a passing mention.
• I didn't mention the "Girls in Scouting" thing at all-- a few of the advocacy groups mention it, but I didn't really find any discussion of it in mainstream media, so I went ahead and ommitted it.
• I didn't mention those two scoutmasters that were arrested (one for murder, one for child porn), and I didn't mention anything to do with the sex abuse or that one lawsuit where someone's suing BSA directly for abuse. Maybe I'm biased, but I just don't see it as truly a problem with the organization-- it seems like any group is going to have a few bad apples.
• I didn't fully get into the on-going "Controversy About Governmental Support"-- I mentioned it, quickly summarized both sides, and linked to the two biggest cases that are involved. Although I did mention the two relevant acts of congress earlier in the article (in the "Support from Government" section), I didn't explicity re-introduce them in them in this section. I didn't get into the curret injuction that's in place, I didn't mention the relevant legal precidents, I didn't really "dig my teeth into it"- I sorta blew past it pretty quickly and only gave a really brief and super informal discussion of the whole "Is it special access or is it equal access" issue. On the one hand, this is justified on the grounds that anything we write now will quickly become dated as those two big cases are decided, appealed, argued, and redecided, and "Wikipedia is not a news agency". On the other hand, it's a big issue, and if anyone felt we really need to get into the legal nitty-gritty of it, sacrificing brevity for the sake of thoroughness, i couldn't totally disagree.

I included a gazillion references inline-- I don't feel most of the links are "needed", as in, someone should really go and visit them, but they are there as references. If we feel that some things are "sufficiently-commonly-known" that we can remove the cites. We also could use a formal reference section, instead of just using the inline style.

I generally used the term "gay" instead of "homosexual"-- Harvard and APA style manuals make me. If you didn't know that, then you probably haven't had to attend a very liberal liberal arts college in the last decade, and if so, I envy you.

What else... PLEASE don't hate me, I went ahead and removed the definitions section since it was so stylistically odd to just have page from the BSA glossary stuck in the article like that. I tried to explicitly make the prose un-ambiguous. So, for example, since "leader" can refer to either adult or youths, I've tried to explicitly use the terms "adult leader" and "youth leader", rather than just lumping them together as "leaders". I think that should help the confusing around that term. I _think_ normal people know what packs and troops are.

I may have gone overboard in giving the background in the "Boy Scouts of America's Position": Baden-Powell, how long and how essential religion has been to the program, and then quoting verbatim the official statements on "Morally Straight" and "Duty to God". Maybe this was overkill, but I wanted it to be crystal clear that scouts didn't just wake up one day in 1981 and decide "We hate gays and atheists, let's kick 'em out". Rather, this was a continuation of the core values of the organization going back to 1910 and the only reason it never came up before 1981 was that there weren't test cases where people sued. At the same time, I realize that that entire section could have been summarized in one paragraph that says "BSA regards homosexuality as immoral, and feels a "duty to god" is essential". But like I said, better to go overboard on explaining the position than having people come away from the article thinking it was some random or arbitrary decision.

Umm... I said that there aren't any pending lawsuits in which people are still trying to actually get a court to directly order BSA to admit them. In all the research i've done, I didn't come across any, but at the same time, I couldn't find any source that explicitly said this is so. But it is true right that since BSA v. Dale, this is a matter of settled law, and since then, the opponents of Scouting have pretty much given up on this, right (well, on that TACTIC I should say-- they're still doing the other stuff obvious). Does anyone know of any cases?

Does anyone know of any openly gay scouts who have been allowed to stay in scouting? My own interpretation of BSA legal policy is that "Morally Straight" doesn't include homosexuality, and if a scout doesn't obey the Scout Law, then he's not a scout, period. But the current wording is ambiguous, and it leaves the minute possiblity that there might be some lone openly-gay scout out there who is so low-ranked and un-ambitious that he in no way whatsoever qualifies as a leader and therefore has been allowed to serve. I'm skeptical, but it's still a possiblity, so I wrote it into the article.

Lastly, I worked really hard to give it that "neutral encyclopedia tone"-- the one that never just says X, but always says "BSA has said X, Critics have said Y. So-and-so alleges X, etc." So, please, everyone, genuinely let's try our hardest to actually BE neutral, and not use this article as a soapbox for an issue we all care about so dearly.

(and I should say-- I'm absolutely not accusing anyone of having done that, I'm not secretly pointing at some one or some side and wagging my finger-- I'm just saying, let's us and try really hard to genuinely keep it 'neutralish' and "encyclopedia-sounding.)

Anyway, I really hope everyone likes it a lot and I hope everyone thinks it's at least an improvement on the old version. -Alecmconroy 03:40, 28 February 2006 (UTC)