The Mayor of Philadelphia is giving the regional Boy Scout council two choices.: Either they stop discriminating against gays or they begin paying fair market rent on their city owned headquarters.
The City of Liberty Council is the third largest in the nation, serving 87,000 boys in Philadelphia, Montgomery and Delaware counties. They have been using a city owned building since 1928, paying only for building upkeep.
The City is playing hard ball because the Scouts refuse to comply with the fair-practices ordinance which forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation among other protected classes.
Cradle of Liberty Council spokesman Jeff Jubelirer had more pointed views.
"With an epidemic of gun violence taking the lives of Philadelphia's children every day," Jubelirer said, "it is ironic the administration chose this time to destroy programming that services 40,000 children in the city."
That's an interesting perspective which completely ignores the fact that the City has tries to negotiate with the Boy Scouts for the past three years. There's no room for negotiation. The Boy Scout organization wants to be free to discriminate against homosexuals while receiving all the governmental funding it can swallow. Never mind the thousands of young men whose lives are impacted by their homo-bigot stance -- the young gay men, the boys with gay parents or siblings or grandparents or other loved ones, the heterosexual scouts who are taught by example to discriminate. Never mind those kids. Or their families. Or their dreams.
There's no room for negotiation. The Boy Scouts won't revise their creed of hate and the City isn't making an exception. Are political nuances at play? Sure. They always are, but that doesn't take away from the larger issue.
Our good friends at the American Family Association of Pennsylvania have chimed right in with their Christian-flavored bigotry:
?The boys involved in the Scouts are caught in a tug-of-war with those who seek to change society through homosexual activism and choose to be blind to the facts of the dangers of this lifestyle,? [AFA Chair Diane] Gramley concluded
Ah, yes, the homosexual activist card. Wouldn't be a hatefest if no one played it!
I find the Boy Scout's stance offensive, moronic and divisive. I don't buy their little snacks or donate to their causes because I think they really hurt boys and young men. I get some grief from my friends about my actions only hurting the boys. I'm sorry but that's an utterly spineless position. The Boy Scouts are *hurting* children, gay and straight. They should lose their funding sources because reason, common decency or genuine concern for all children doesn't seem to play a part in their decision making process.
