ACLU 'Defends' Freedom By Opposing Boy Scouts

Joe Bell

In 1999 the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon alleging the government should not support the Boy Scouts because the Scout oath requires members to believe in God. The ACLU recently won a victory in its ongoing battle against the Scouts when, on November 16, the Pentagon said it would warn military bases not to directly sponsor Scout troops.

It is inexcusable that the Pentagon, which summoned the courage to defend Europe against the Soviet army and today fights terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, has dissolved before the ACLU’s indefatigable attacks against the Scouts.

On November 18, the Washington Times reported Bob Bork, a spokesman for the Scouts, said the Pentagon’s decision will affect about 400 military-sponsored Scout units.

Mr. Bork said, “The ACLU has had a maniacal obsession with the Boy Scouts for decades. I have no doubt they want to force us out of any relationship with the military or any government entity whatsoever.”

The goal of the ACLU is as transparent as it is shameful – the elimination of even the most benign connection between God and government.

The Boy Scout web page cites the offending oath and offers an analysis of its meaning. An individual joining the Scouts swears to “do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

It asks Scouts to follow the wisdom of their God as taught by parents and religious leaders and to “respect and defend the rights of others to practice their own beliefs.”

The oath also requires each Scout to learn about America’s system of government, to help improve his community and to remember that his “cheerful smile and helping hand will ease the burden of many who need assistance.”

Those are precisely the values government should be helping instill in young people.

Scouting is open to all young boys who are willing to accept the rules of the organization. But participation in the Scouts is not compulsory. Those who do not believe in the tenets that established the organization do not have to join. Everyone is free to have their own beliefs.

However, one might allege: “The oath discriminates against those who want to join but who do not believe in God.”

Everyone has the unqualified right to deny the existence of God. Neither the government nor the Boy Scouts has the right to force faith. But neither should the Scouts have to modify their creed, or their association with the DoD, to accommodate those who reject it but want to join anyway.
All organizations have rules they expect their members to abide by. Those who disagree with them cannot expect an organization to constantly reform itself until it no longer resembles its original incarnation.

The government has long had a relationship with religion. The branches of the military employ chaplains and the Senate and the House also have chaplains. In addition, the Boy Scouts is a federally chartered organization that has been approved by Congress.

Clearly the ACLU is trying to exorcise God from government and society. It is patiently at work, like water eroding a rock over time. The organization is able to hoodwink America because the phrase “separation of church and state” has been misused for so long that few people understand its meaning.

First, the phrase is not in the Constitution.

Second, as Yale University law professor Stephen L. Carter explained in his book, “The Culture of Disbelief,” the separation of church and state “originated in an effort to protect religion from the state, not the state from religion. The religious clauses of the First Amendment were crafted to permit maximum freedom to the religious.”

The ACLU is working to restrict that freedom.

In his book, “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed firsthand the relationship between religion, morality and freedom in the new nation. It is part of America’s history.

Tocqueville wrote, “Religion is considered as the guardian of mores, and mores are regarded as the guarantee of the laws and pledge for the maintenance of freedom itself.”

He noted that in America the law allows people a wide range of freedom but “there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.”

Sadly, today there are many things that Americans imagine and dare that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era. It is essential that our civilizing institutions, like the Boy Scouts and our government, work to instill character in young people.

The ACLU seeks to impose absolute liberty by keeping the wall between religion and state so high that, in order to maintain such an extreme separation, America must forget its own history. That is the ultimate danger behind the ACLU’s Boy Scout fixation and, ironically, it undermines the liberty its adherents seek to preserve.

The controversy that has been manufactured by the ACLU is about far more than separation of church and state; it is about the separation of America from its past and the separation of society from its moral foundation. The Declaration of Independence appealed to the “Laws of Nature” and to “Nature’s God,” not to tradition or conventional law. By establishing a new basis for legitimizing government America became the most successful nation, by every measure, in human history. To disqualify that history is to change the character of America just as disconnecting the Scouts from their oath and denying them the right to connect with the federal government would alter the character of Scouting. Neither a nation nor an organization can abandon its source and remain undiminished.

The Scouts do not conscript youths, then indoctrinate and discharge them as androids that believe in God. It is an organization motivated by certain beliefs and those who share them and wish to cultivate them are invited to join. Equally important, those who do not share those convictions will not, and should not, ever be compelled to accept them. There is no reason to be threatened or offended by a Boy Scout connection to the DoD.

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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

jbellopedresponse@hotmail.com