THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes in this entry:

I was never a Scout, but I hope that Scouting survives. What fascinates me is not so much the revelation about Scouting as the revelation about liberalism, which is willing to switch positions diametrically, systematically ignore evidence, and exploit whatever is of momentary advantage against the objects of its perpetual scorn and hatred.  For decades the Boy Scout organization made the point that permitting homosexuals to serve as group leaders would be to invite abuse.  The Scouts based their position on the well-grounded assumption that male homosexuality is essentially pedophiliac and that it would be crazy to put pedophiles in charge of boys and adolescents.  The American Left sustained a relentless culture-war against the Scouts that rested on categorizing that perfectly reasonable assumption and its argumentative consequence as a bigoted fantasy.  Now it turns out that when homosexuals did inveigle the organization, they perpetrated exactly the kinds of abuses predicted by conservative wisdom.  What is the Left’s new argument?  It is that the Scouts are wicked for concealing documentation that homosexual group leaders had preyed on their charges.  Of course these developments are in part a replay of another of the Left’s ongoing crusades – the one against the Catholic Church.  In the eyes of the Left, the Church is guilty on the one hand of condemning homosexuality and of trying to keep homosexuals out of the priesthood and on the other of covering up the outrages of priest-pedophiles.

I am reminded by a series of associations of something that I witnessed twenty years ago while teaching at Central Michigan University, which also reveals the evil of liberalism.  There had been several sexual scandals involving faculty in exploitative relations with students.  The administration responded by proposing a rule.  That rule would have made it out of order for any faculty member to engage in sexual relations with any student currently under his or her supervision.  In other words, if “Coed Candy” were enrolled in Professor Romeo’s postmodern novel class this semester, Professor Romeo would merely have to wait until the next semester to unwrap her.  The rule went before the faculty committee for approval – and the faculty voted it down by a whopping colossal margin.  Liberals will not even vote minimally to delay gratification, but they call other people wicked for taking commonsense measures to protect the young against criminal trespass.

—– Comments —-

Kevin M. writes:

The Boy Scouts are on the front page of cnn.com.

It has begun.