I personally hope that Jerry Sandusky and every person that helped hide his crimes all get done to them what they did or helped him to do to those children while they are in prison. This also goes for every priest in the Catholic Church that helped to hide the same crimes.
Now the Boy Scouts are on that list, too. How could any organization be so rabidly homophobic while simultaneously condoning the rape of children? And garner such widespread support in hiding their crimes? The 15,000--and yes, that's fifteen thousand--page report known as the "abuse files" that have been reported on in the news recently are just a small portion of a record that the Scouts have been keeping since shortly after they were founded in 1910. That's a hundred years of suffering children silenced when they begged for help because every police officer, prosecutor, and pastor they or their parents approached turned a deaf ear to their cries--all for the sake of saving the "good name" of the Boy Scouts.
Don't get me wrong. I think that the idea of the Scouts is a good one. In the world we live in now, we need groups and organizations that can teach boys the necessary characteristics they will need to become not just good men but good members of society. However, no organization is or should be above reproach or the law. No institution is that sacred. Not one thing in this world is worth preserving if we have to sacrifice our children for its sake. If any group that is supposed to serve the public trust cannot be held up before the candle of free speech and show itself as transparent, then it does not deserve to exist.
The pedophiles weren't welcome. But just as a herd of gazelles at a watering hole draw lions, a group of children draw sexual predators. That was not well understood until the last 10 years or so.
ReplyDeleteI knew it when I was a Scout Leader. We had minimum of two unrelated adults at all times when Scouts were present. Tried for four, would not go camping with less than three. I told the other adults that they watched me, I watched them. In addition, only parents were leaders, so at least I knew why people were joining. I was firm about it, required my leaders to be trained on current child protection standards, treated it like a safety issue.
No one I knew in Scouting ever condoned child rape.