The Boy Scouts and Our Shrinking Island

   Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island when the Professor becomes convinced the island is sinking into the sea?
 
  That's what I felt like when I saw the story today suggesting that the Boy Scouts may soon cave to pressure from aggressive homosexual activists. According to a spokesman for the organization, a board meeting next week is scheduled to discuss shifting their longstanding policy against open homosexuals as troop members and leaders to a policy that "would leave decisions on membership and leadership up to the BSA' s 290 local governing councils and 116,000 sponsoring religious and civic groups" (from USA Today).

   Please don't do this, Boy Scouts; don't surrender to the pressure of the new fascists who will never settle for anything less than compulsory affirmation of homosexuality as a fully valid behavior and identity. And as we're learning from the ever-growing acronym (now LGBTQQIA, I believe), gay rights is only the first step in the push for a muddled  myriad of sexual distortions. And the galling thing about the aggressive campaign for outness and proudness in our schools and youth organizations is that teens (and younger) are being told in their most vulnerable, confusing season of  life to base their permanent identity upon adolescent sexual struggles.

  If the Boy Scouts fall, the island of resistance believing Catholics occupy regarding the new morality suddenly gets smaller. And it's not hard to see at least some of our evangelical brothers and sisters (I'm looking at you, Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, and Rachel Held Evans) readying their boats to leave us, losing the stomach to stay and fight for the truth that human sexuality has a proper end--a telos--toward which we are oriented as people created male and female in God's image.

  How long will the rest hold out? As we've already seen regarding divorce and contraception, some sola scriptura Christians (but not all, please God) have a deft ability to interpret Scripture in a way less offensive to contemporary values.

  Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that the Boy Scouts attempting such an alleged compromise will be a mere rest stop on the way to mandatory inclusion. The late Father Richard John Neuhaus believed in this axiom: When orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed. And with the rising homosexual heterodoxy, how long until an understanding of human sexuality rooted in biological complementarity is viewed as bigotry that is contradictory to the Scouting spirit and worthy of civil censure?

   Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher, pray for us!