Have the Boy Scouts been taking lessons in secrecy from the Catholic church?
The Washington state supreme court has forced the Boy Scouts of America to turn over "ineligible volunteer" files that revealed a sexual abuse problem among Scout leaders far greater than the organization previously admitted.
Although justices ruled that the files themselves would not be made public, attorneys said the Boy Scouts "have ejected at least 5,100 adult leaders nationwide for sexual abuse allegations since 1946," according to the Seattle Times.
In the past 15 years, the organization has kicked out leaders for abuse allegations at a rate of one every other day.
Their "ineligible volunteer" files lump both pedophiles and known homosexuals into one "degenerate" bucket, but at least they seem to have some idea that the two are not one and the same. Jon Davidson of Lambda Legal:
Even the organization's literature says it's a myth that gay men are more likely to engage in sexual abuse than straight men," Davidson said. "They never have asserted that (potential pedophilia) is a reason to exclude gay men from the Scouts. They simply insist that gay men don't make good role models."You can read the article here. Granted, they've at least been dismissing alleged abusers rather than shuffling them around, but in general it's not ever been reported to authorities. That's just so infuriating.
Pedophiles often become Boy Scout leaders because they can have access to kids. But for most of them, it's about (abusing) kids before puberty, and the gender of the child is less important. Research has shown that the group least likely to engage with sex with boys are open and out gay men.
