What do you know? The Boy Scouts, those superior folk who don’t traffic with gays and unbelievers, have a history of child sexual abuse almost as sordid as the Catholic Church’s, or the Southern Baptist Convention’s.
More than 1,200 secret files on suspected sexual molesters in the Boy Scouts of America were made public Thursday, offering a detailed view of how the Scouts handled suspected molestations from the early 1960s through 1985.
Abuse suspects from all over the country are named in the files — many of them never reported to police or charged with a crime. Doctors, lawyers, politicians and policemen are among the accused and many are about to face public exposure for the first time.
Come to think of it, aren’t many Scout troops sponsored by churches? Yes.
The Christian narrative is false; there is no question of it. All that remains, then, are its ethical teachings — and we are quite within our rights to ask whether those ethical teachings conduce toward good behavior and happy endings.
No, they don’t.
They lay the groundwork for emotional problems that too often find eventual expression as sexual misbehaviors. Seriously: What is supposed to happen when a child grows up hearing the drumbeat that he is no damn good, that he can never be any good, that all the desires of his heart are wicked, that all his ambitions are doomed to failure if they don’t comport with the Mysterious Plan of an Invisible Wizard?
According to a 27-page document, Bumgarner was a 21-year-old Scoutmaster, and the son of a pastor, who was accused of molesting a Scout during a camping trip in Lenoir, N.C. in 1979.
Bumgarner served time in jail for that crime and was put on probation by the Boy Scouts.
A chorus of apologists are due to get going any minute, and they’ll be singing the same tune the old communist apologists used to sing and church apologists sing today: The ideas are good, but we trusted bad people.
No. The ideas are bad, and they warp and deform people.
