Nothing shows how so-called liberals have forgotten the meaning of liberty like their new vendetta against the Boy Scouts.That's right. The Boy Scouts are no longer politically correct. The ayatollahs of the Left are now conducting a nationwide jihad to bring them to heel.

A recent discrimination suit against the Scouts for refusing to retain an openly gay activist as a local adult Scout leader ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Just this past July, the Court ruled that the constitutional right to freedom of association protects the freedom of the Scouts to choose their own leaders.

Unfortunately, that has not ended the matter. Scouting for All, an organization of gay activist groups and others, has opened a national pressure campaign to force the Scouts to change their policy precluding homosexuals from adult leader positions. The group organized protest rallies across the country against the Boy Scouts on August 21.

One such protest took place at the regional Scout headquarters in Bethesda. The group demanded that the Scouts be denied the use of all public facilities and any public recognition because of their "discriminatory" policies. The group also called for churches and civic associations to cut off all support for the Scouts.

The controversy even spilled over at the recent Democrat National Convention. Delegates actually booed a group of Eagle scouts who were taking part in an opening ceremony at the invitation of the Convention. Democrat spokesmen later offered no apologies to the scorned young scouts, but, rather, reiterated the party's support for the gay activist agenda. This is definitely not your father's Democrat party.

The problem with this pressure campaign is that the Boy Scout organization is not for all. It is a private organization composed of local units of parents and neighbors who come together to impart traditional moral and religious values to their local boys. It is quite rightly not open to those who want to fight those values and impart different ones, or who do not share those values.

What we have here is so-called liberals attempting to impose their moral values on others. They are doing exactly what they are always accusing the "religious right" of doing. They are demanding that the Boy Scouts be remade according to their own presumed superior moral views.

First, gay and left wing activist groups tried to get the courts to declare outright illegal the efforts of the Boy Scouts to adhere to and promote their traditional moral values. They insisted that the government force the Scouts to appoint adult leaders with the opposite moral views and messages for the boys.

Failing that, they are now demanding that governments at all levels, and church and civic groups, effectively declare these traditional moral and religious values socially unacceptable. The Scouts may be free for now to adhere to these supposedly absurd moral views. But then they must be treated by all as the equivalent of a Nazi or segregationist front group, excluded from public and civic participation.

The Boy Scouts, however, are not promoting the equivalent of Nazi or segregationist views. They are promoting traditional moral values, held by tens of millions, if not a majority, of Americans, following mainstream moral and religious doctrines going back thousands of years. The left wing extremist groups now harassing the Scouts effectively insist that we condemn all these Americans, as well as Catholicism, traditional Protestantism, and Orthodox Judaism, as socially outcast.

In a truly liberal, free society, the Boy Scouts would be free to decide whom they want as adult leaders and what moral messages they want to communicate. Those who disagree with the Scouts would be free to criticize them. But the many who agree with the Scouts must be free to reject that criticism as well. To then label all of them social pariahs, as a matter of official government policy no less, that is what is truly divisive.

The truly liberal response instead would be for those who disagree with the Scouts to start their own competing scouting organization following their moral values. They can call it Scouting for All. Of course, they probably wouldn't accept as adult leaders Nazis, skinheads, segregationists, tobacco stockholders, Rush Limbaugh listeners, NRA members, fundamentalist Christians, the rich, or conservative Republicans. So it wouldn't really be scouting for all. But it would be liberal.

We can then test what the public thinks is the most appropriate in the marketplace of ideas. People with different values would even be free to join different groups following their respective views.

In fact, some religious groups who think the Boy Scouts are too secular started their own more religious scouting groups long ago. Others who think the regular scouts are too militaristic and hierarchical have started another group holding their views.
These enlightened dissenters have shown the way. What's wrong with a little scouting competition?

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Peter Ferrara is Associate Professor of Law at the George Mason University School of Law, and Executive Director of the American Civil Rights Union.