Hope Against an Endless Revolution: What happened to the Boy Scouts of America?

I think I wrote the following column for my local paper, the Paris Post Intelligencer, about eight years ago. I think it remains relevant so am re-posting here on my blog. I have only made a few small edits. I do not know the current state of the Boy Scouts of America except that I believe they have been in a law suit and membership is down. Please correct me if I am wrong.

It should not come as any surprise that the Boy Scouts of America have caved to the homosexual movement and allowed openly homosexual boys in their ranks rather than stay true to their founding principles, or that they have done so against the will of the majority of the BSA’s supporters. This country was founded by revolution and ever since has been led contrary to the desires of the majority by radicals (think militant homosexuals in this case) and elites (think the board members of the BSA).  This is just the latest chapter in America’s endless series of revolutions.

Let’s say that as a consequence of this decision, the BSA’s enrollment collapses due to the bigotry of parents who do not want their sons exposed to homosexuality or to even imagine that such a deviancy is in any way okay.

This is not a far-fetched speculation. In 1998 the Canadian Boys Scouts, way the heck up in the ever progressive north, did the same thing, and since then the CBS’s enrolment has plummeted by almost 60%. It is as likely as not that the BSA’s decline down here in the Bible-thumping, gun-toting, unenlightened South is going to be even more precipitous.

Now let’s say that as a result of this hypothesised decline, the BSA collapses altogether, ceasing to exist or existing as a shell of its former self. Will the homosexual radicals and their liberal revolutionary allies apologise for destroying it?

No, because being leftist radicals and thus narrow-minded and self-centered, they dont give a hoot about the BSA, but only care that their idea of freedom and equality prevails, regardless of the cost to others. They will drive the round peg through the square hole because, dad-burn-it, it ought to fit.  They think this way and do these things because they are the heirs of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and have been fighting revolutions ever since from Russia to China to Cuba and certainly from sea to shining sea.

It doesn’t occur to them that Freedom and Equality are mortal enemies, and that any ground gained by one is at the expense of the other. A step towards freedom is a step away from equality and vice-versa. But the progressives will have both, dad-blast-it, because both are sovereign goods, and any one who disagrees is a heretic and ought to be burned at the stake… metaphorically… literally if possible.

In their struggle to impose two conflicting ideas on reality they are creating a society that is simultaneously anarchic and tyrannical. Anarchic by their success at freeing man from self-restraint, and tyrannical by the necessity of using the power of the state to both free man and create equality.

Theirs is the pipe dream of the religious fanatic. They’ll fail because the river will not flow upstream, but they’ll never tire of the struggle or lose faith. Or count the cost because they are not paying the bill.

No, they will never stop, anymore than a shark will stop swimming. It is in their nature to seek out and destroy anyone or any institution that stands in their way or does not agree wholeheartedly with their latest radicalism du jour. It would have been fine and dandy if the radicalism had stopped with American independence, white male suffrage, abolition, black male suffrage, and then women’s suffrage. But under the same banner of freedom and equality, American radicalism kept right on marching to the welfare state, no-fault divorce, abortion, and now on to gay marriage and the height of all liberal absurdities, women in combat. Will it ever end? Will they never cease transforming us? Will we ever be good enough for them to leave us alone?

Let’s say that we just prostrated ourselves before them and said, ‘Okay liberals who never sleep and never tire. You win. We surrender. We can’t take the constant struggle. Everything you currently stand for we accept.’

Here’s what the victorious liberal radical would do. He’d lean down, pat us on the head, maybe scratch us behind the ears, and say, ‘That’s a good former-conservative/Christian/whatever.  Yes you are!  Now let’s turn earth into heaven, the way your god should have done, if he had ever existed at all.’

There is a bright side for conservatives though, if we can look beyond the long shadow that seems to be drawing over an America that we recognise less and less.  It’s an unintended consequence of the liberal advance and one that I dont know if they quite see coming.  Because they define the popular culture by their control of the media, they imagine that the culture is morphing into a monolithic liberal vision, when in reality it is slowly separating, like a cell splitting, into two wholly irreconcilable halves.

Yes, we may very well have lost the BSA.  But each time a weak-kneed institution bends that knee to Baal, conservatives quietly create new customs and institutions to replace it, which will be impervious to takeover by leftists or their self-destructive ideas.

This cultural and institutional separation is imperative if our grandchildren are not to be swept up and absorbed into liberalism’s dystopian vision of the future. It is indeed time to come out from among them… and then circle the wagons.

M.C. Atkins

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