Saturday, August 20, 2011

Scouts, the Left, and the Candidates

The left wing blog, the Beast, has an article comparing two of the presidential candidates on their interactions with the Boy Scouts. There was a time that the Scouts were held high as an organization which fostered loyalty, accomplishment, team work, individual accomplishment, and were considered contributors to America. The left seems to see them as some form of malignant infiltrators seeking to destroy their view of what we should all be doing.

They are not Hitler Youth, quite far from it. But the Beast, aptly named I assume, takes the position that one candidate did the right thing by denying Scout participation in the Olympics and the other candidate is somehow Attila the Hun.

As the article states:

Perry’s view of the outside world hasn’t changed too much since then. He’ll vigorously defend the Scouts no matter who the perceived enemy might be. Besides that turncoat Romney, there are bullies everywhere. Atheists and gay activists are the most threatening.

His biggest bugaboo might be the American Civil Liberties Union, the individual-rights organization, which has been particularly litigious when it comes to the Scouts. Everywhere, Perry sees an assault on his wholesome Scouts; the judiciary and the ivory tower are both stacked with liberal relativists. Psychiatrists are overdrugging America’s kids. Even the whole math movement has apparently run roughshod over, you know, normal arithmetic. Pretty typical of what keeps conservatives up at night.

 It now is clear that one candidate cannot make a decision, somewhat what we have now, and the other can. Perhaps the better candidate has come forth, we shall see.

The Scouts have a valid, necessary and productive cause which they have delivered on for a century. Very few other youth groups can say the same. Yes there are organizations that want to deny the individualism which had made America, the individualism observed by de Tocqueville, and the individualism which survives to this day. That is a major theme of the Scouts.

I have never understood why the left wing is so terrified of the Boy Scouts. Is it the Marksmanship Merit Badge perhaps, or is it Reptile Study? Is it the fact that a majority of the men admitted to the Military Academies were Eagle Scouts, the same men who follow orders and put their lives at risk day after day. My first Scout Master was one of those quiet men, Fred Droste, a veteran, leader, and a quiet man, quiet after WW II. Thus I wonder what this fear is that drives them to truly fear little 11 year old boys who go camping?

As for the ACLU, I would argue it is not individual rights as one would understand the Individualism of many Americans, but the group rights of the Progressives. Does that make a difference, yes it does, for the Progressive's group rights deny the Individualism, the true individual's rights.

Thus is there a difference between these two candidates. There appears to be. One stands for whatever he has to, the other for what he believes. Now I believe in evolution, in fact anyone who works in biology, especially in propagating species and hybrids as I have done for decades, cannot but see the pattern of evolution; either the intelligent design of the hybridizer, really a bit of luck, or the survival of the fittest in the mountain side of my rejects, the plants I just cannot throw on the compost pile, surviving and prospering, and taking over the mountain side. That by the way was a skill learned in the Scouts.