Last Updated on February 22, 2022
The Boy Scouts of America voted this week to not vote on whether to allow openly gay males in their ranks, deciding they needed to hear more from their members before making such a decision.
In one of the many news stories I saw about the topic, I saw a man apparently active in the organization — I assume he’s at least a Scout Master if not higher in rank than that — who said what many have said: he doesn’t want openly gay people allowed into the Scouts because he objects to homosexuality on religious grounds.
I can certainly understand that point of view, even if it is an obvious case of him trying to impose his religious views on the entire organization, or, at the very least, him expecting the organization to uphold his personal religious views toward everyone else.
But what if the issue were alcoholism, not homosexuality?
The Bible says, “Be not drunk with wine.” There’s an excellent argument to be made that this is not a commandment never to take a drink at all, but rather to not drink to pointless excesses.
Regardless of how severely you interpret that scripture, imagine that the “villains” in this particular case were people who’d had an alcohol problem. Bear with me: there’s an important reason I’m making such a seemingly-strange parallel.
Not everyone who is an alcoholic drinks alcohol. Once you become an alcoholic, you remain one. You’re an alcoholic while you attend meetings to fight the resistance to drink. You’re an alcoholic when you order sparkling cider at parties where everyone else is toasting achievements with champagne. You’re an alcoholic as you celebrate 10, 15, 20 or more years without having touched a drop.
What if you read, “Be not drunk with wine” as “Don’t touch alcohol. Ever.” How would you feel about a person you knew to be an alcoholic?
Not everyone who is an alcoholic drinks.
Here’s the parallel: just because someone is a homosexual doesn’t mean that they actively have sex with members of the same gender. There’s a contingent of gay people who feel that homosexuality is wrong: they cannot choose to whom they are attracted, but they do choose not to act on those attractions.
They’re homosexuals, and they may well be open about their attraction. But they don’t act on it.
Just like alcoholics who are successfully battling the urge against the bottle, they have taken up their own struggle to not act against their genetic programming that they have otherwise been unable to change, whether they want to change it or not.
We seem to have this notion that it’s okay to target only certain groups. Homosexuals are a popular target for Christians; I think it’s always easy for people to object to those with whom they personally identify with the least.
So it may be surprising, even unconsidered, that being gay is not the same as being a pedophile, that a man who is attracted to other men is not attracted to underage boys.
What if alcoholism were the issue? Would you allow an alcoholic to lead scouts, even if you weren’t certain whether he was a practicing alcoholic?
That’s not something you’re ever going to know, even if you manage to make a rule that they declare whether they practice or not, any more than you’d know for certain that a scout or scout leader lived a life behind closed doors that mirrored all of the organization’s values. At least not until you managed to sneak behind those doors to see for yourself.
If one’s path is so clear, so proper, so right, can’t one reasonably expect to positively influence those around him? For some reason, when it comes to Christians and homosexuality, that question almost never get considered, and I’ve yet to figure out why.
Your Turn:
How do you feel about the debate? Should the Boy Scouts exclude males they know to be gay from participation? Or should everyone be allowed to participate regardless of orientation?
“Don’t act on it” “Battling” Seriously??? Like this is a disease. All I can say is… how unfortunate people can even think this way.Â
“They’re homosexuals, and they may well be open about their attraction. But they don’t act on it.
Just like alcoholics who are successfully battling the urge against the bottle, they have taken up their own struggle to not act against their genetic programming that they have otherwise been unable to change, whether they want to change it or not.”
Patrick, I was debating all day whether I should write something. I just couldn’t make up mind if I was going to write something and if so what was I going to write. What made up my mind was this email I just received from the support group… “K___’s son, E___, a transgender boy of 14, has ended his life. We are asking members to keep them in your prayers…â€
For you this just a debate, for me it is real. When people call us names like ### or call us sinners or laugh at us it chips away at us like a sore wound. Unfortunately K is not the only person that I knew who took their own life, he is the fourth and I stopped counting when the number went over a dozen of people that I know who tried to take their life. The number of trans-people who have taken their lives is four times the national average and the number of us who thought about is over 50%.
We never chose to be transgender or gay or lesbian we were born this way and asking us to deny our nature is wrong. There is overwhelming medical evidence supporting that is true. Read “As Nature Made Him,†it is about a twin who was being circumscribed and the doctor slipped and they told the parents don’t worry we will just do a little surgery and “she†will never know. Well he did know. Brain scans show that our brain looks more like the gender that we identify than our birth gender. That is one of the reasons they stopped doing surgery on intersex babies, because they knew their true gender.
You analogy about an alcoholic is wrong. An alcoholic does damage to themselves and to their friends around them. It creates all types of medical problems and it is destructive behavior. It puts others people in danger. A better analogy is someone having premarital sex. We tell them that you cannot have sex before marriage, but we treat them differently than we treat gay men, lesbian women or trans-people who have sex.
I agree with what you wrote about pedophilia. These so called “Family†organizations equate us with pedophilia. When they try to label us like that they are creating a false sense of danger and ignore the real danger.
I see the Boy Scouts as trying divide and conquer, they are trying to deny that they discriminate, to take the focus of one institution and put it on the thousands of organizations around the nation.
I hope you will forgive me for my rant.
DianaCT I completely understand your rant and I’m so sorry to hear about “E.”Â
My comparison to alcoholism was in no way meant to suggest that abusing alcohol (or any other drug) doesn’t cause damage; I’ve had alcoholism in my family over the years and I’ve certainly seen that.
My intent was to compare two types of behavior that could be Biblically interpreted as being “sin,” but that are handled in completely different ways. Pre-marital sex is another example of this double standard of judgement.
that is like saying because a person is heterosexual they will automatically be drawn to members of the opposite sex. insanity. who cares, as long as they are good, honest people?
HaveSippy Well, technically, a heterosexual IS drawn to members of the opposite sex. The critical point is that a heterosexual isn’t automatically drawn to ALL members of the opposite sex and certainly isn’t automatically drawn to UNDERAGE members of the opposite sex. 🙂