Let the Boy Scouts Die Out, Already

By Matt Farwell, The New Republic

24 February 20

An Eagle Scout lays out how the organization was morally bankrupt long before it filed for Chapter 11 protection.

was an active Boy Scout as a teenager because I had strong motivation: getting myself the hell out of the Scouting movement. It was a cultural rite and a family thing, one I hated—but the rule was that I couldn’t leave until I’d reached the highest rank. My older brothers were Eagle Scouts, as were most of my cousins and nephews. Now the Boy Scouts of America are filing for bankruptcy, like USA Gymnastics and a bunch of Catholic dioceses in the United States before them, and for similar reasons. The Scouts’ motto, of course, is “Be Prepared,” but when it came to compensating a mere fraction of the victims of sexual assault in their dens, they weren’t. Now their finances will mirror their morals. 

Good, I thought, when I heard the news. I hope this means they’re dead as a cultural force. The entire Scouting ethos is based on predation. One guy from a Virginia Boy Scouts troop of mine later pleaded guilty to molesting children in a church building during his Mormon mission to Las Vegas. I lost track of most of the rest. I made Eagle at 14, and that was that. 

I’d started out early in the organization, in Germany; my dad was stationed at Bitburg Air Base, but our family lived out in town, which meant that, aside from school, Cub Scouts was where I hung out with Americans of my own age. I was indifferent to the group, but I loved the outdoors; I spent most of my time out in the woods or down by the river and traveled steadily up the ranks—Bobcat, Wolf, Bear, and Webelos, and Arrow of Light, for which I vaguely recall walking a thin, slightly raised platform meant to symbolize a bridge.

It wasn’t really my thing, but in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints it was the official youth program for boys, and a record of promotions through the organization was cultural currency—tangible evidence, like the accumulation of material goods, of your spiritual success. Having a family full of Eagle Scouts meant having a family full of righteous men, and training began early. It was simply something I knew I’d have to get through.

By the time we moved back to the States, I was 11, eligible to join the Boy Scouts; there wasn’t much choice in the matter. Scouting should’ve been a natural fit: I already enjoyed running around in the woods by my house wearing camouflage, playing Army man; I’d sewn my own ghillie suit. But Scouting was full of weirdos being babysat by man-children on power trips once a week on Wednesday night, with weekend campouts every couple of months, plus a week at a Scout camp in summer. 

I raced through the program as fast as possible, ready to quit once I’d gotten Eagle. My Boy Scout Requirements 1993–1995 book charts the minimum required progress for Eagle Scout: 16 months and a total of 21 merit badges. That’s what I did, carefully and cynically choosing the easiest elective merit badges, like Pets (“Requirement 3: Present evidence that you have cared for a pet for four months”) and Collections (“Requirement 2: Explain the growth and development of your collection”). These accompanied the required merit badges, like Personal Management (“Requirement 6: Tell how important credit and installment buying are to our economy and the individual and the family”). 

Doing this, I learned—and am reminded now, flipping through the merit badge requirements—how much the Boy Scouts were cultural predators. They ripped off and distorted Native American dress, customs, and cultures as shamelessly as Instagramming white girls in headdress at Coachella. The “Indian Lore” merit badge required a scout to give the history of one Indian tribe, make a full Indian costume, and visit a museum to see Indian artifacts but never once mentions talking to a Native person—there are only 2.9 million in the U.S.

A fraternity within Boy Scouts called Order of the Arrow is among the worst at such cultural appropriation: Its “tapping out” ceremony, described here by Native artist and Scout mother Ozheebeegay Ikwe, leans heavily on whites wearing redface. (“While American Indian attire has been the historic tradition used in OA ceremonies,” the Order announced in an update on its website last month, “circumstances may dictate that lodges use either the Scout Field Uniform or the Alternative Ceremonial Clothing.” The announcement concluded by assuring OA members that “Ceremony scripts and the core messages they possess are remaining the same.”)

The high cost of the Scouting program was another form of predation: It’s expensive to be a member. Today, a bare-bones short-sleeve Scout shirt sets parents back $36.99, a shoulder patch $3.49, a long-sleeve shirt and switchback canvas uniform pants each come in at $39.99, a belt $12.99, a neckerchief $10.99, and socks $9.99. Not that the uniform components were all required, but that resulted in a tiered uniform system that subtly distinguished the rich and upper-middle-class kids from the poor. Kids with money had better gear for camping, and it was never cheap to attend a national or international jamboree (which worked out for me, since I had little interest in going).

At my Eagle Scout board of review, I recall feeling uncomfortable as old men asked me what I would do if one of my friends told me they were gay (“Requirement 2: Demonstrate Scout Spirit by living the Scout Oath”). To my shame—to this day, it bothers me—I hedged, faced those stuffy codgers wearing $9 Boy Scout socks and matching bright kerchiefs, put on my most earnest expression, and said something to the effect that I would try to help my hypothetical gay friend not be so gay, if they didn’t want to be gay. This seemed to satisfy them, as did the thousand-plus books that my book drive collected for the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters. I passed my review, got my terminal rank, had it presented in another weird ceremony, then kept my promise and promptly quit. Years later, when I enlisted in the Army, I entered at a slightly higher than usual rank, private first class, because I had been an Eagle Scout.

The whole Scouting organization was rotten, that’s been crystal clear to me since then; it seemed confirmed when disaster artist Robert Gates left the BSA presidency in 2016. When your outfit is abandoned by a Beltway maven who failed to predict the Soviet Union’s fall as an intel analyst, palled around with Iran-Contra conspirators as a CIA deputy director, and oversaw America’s post-9/11 wars of choice as the secretary of defense—twice—you know there’s some sinister shit afoot. Rats are always the first ones off a sinking ship.

The Boy Scouts have long known about the predators within their midst: Their own closely guarded “Perversion Files” tracked sexual abuse cases from 1944 to 2016. The numbers are staggering: 12,000 alleged victims—all children and teenagers—abused by 7,800 separately identified Scoutmasters. Think about those numbers, coming from an organization that held itself up as a pillar of American morality. That’s at least 72 years of horrifying, intimate abuse, hidden and concealed by an organization that taught its charges to “Do a good turn daily” while producing enough victims to fill an Army division. Many of these victims had no safe place to turn—as the new documentary The Church and the First Estate painfully shows. The film follows the story of Adam Steed, who was told by both his Scout and church leaders to forgive his abuser and forget the abuse but went to the police instead. The Scoutmaster accused by Steed admitted to molesting 24 other boys, ultimately receiving five months in jail and 15 years’ parole. It boggles the mind.

All this was going on while the Scouts fought unsuccessful battles in court to keep barring openly gay men from serving in their ranks. Meanwhile, the adult Scouting executives were making out like bandits—in 2009, a Charity Navigator report showed that the CEO of BSA was one of the top five earners in the nonprofit space, taking home a cool $1,577,600 in annual salary. The long con of Scouting paid off, until it didn’t. The glut of allegations and evidence is overwhelming—by the BSA’s count, it faces 275 abuse lawsuits across the U.S., plus thousands more additional claims, above and beyond the ones it’s already settled to the tune of $150 million it has paid in settlements since 2017. Even with $1.4 billion in assets, the organization faces so many credible abuse claims that its insurance policies are refusing to pay out.

Though I didn’t have the language to express it in my youth, I discovered that the Boy Scouts of America was full of men like Bob Gates: self-righteous, well-scrubbed creeps who kept their external aura of civic virtue shiny, obscuring the grubby evil in the institutions and traditions they oversaw. Reading through the lawsuits against the organization, it becomes clear that the BSA was an organization by predators for predators, optimized to groom and produce more predators. We should learn lessons from the victimized children’s stories, about accountability and justice: Judging from this preemptive bankruptcy, I doubt we ever will.

How to Protect Democracy From Lawless Presidents Like Trump

By Adam Schiff, The Los Angeles Times

23 February 20

he impeachment trial of President Trump has ended, but the threat to our democracy continues. In the short time since the trial concluded, the president has proven that the House managers’ warning to senators that he will never change was prescient.

President Trump’s actions demonstrate the need to develop and pass legislative reforms to safeguard the checks and balances of our democracy. Building new guardrails to defend against authoritarian-minded presidents must now be a top priority for Congress.

Within days of the Senate vote, Trump began to exact revenge against officials who complied with lawful subpoenas and told the truth to Congress. He had a security escort remove Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated combat veteran, from the White House’s National Security Council, along with his twin brother, who served as an ethics attorney.

The president’s vengeance against civil servants is disturbing enough, but it occurred alongside an even greater danger that has come into sharper focus this week: the politicization and potential weaponization of the Department of Justice.

Trump insists he has the absolute right to direct the actions of the department. His efforts to obstruct investigations into his own misconduct and that of his associates — firing FBI Director James B. Comey, seeking to fire Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and much more — are well documented. And now, the president has found his Roy Cohn in Atty. Gen. William Barr, who has shown himself willing to be the president’s political fixer and do his bidding at the expense of the department’s independence.

The severity of the threat to our democracy was made plain last week in a succession of troubling actions by the Justice Department.

Last Monday, the department recommended that Roger Stone, the president’s longtime political advisor and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster,” be sentenced according to standard federal guidelines for the serious crimes he committed. Mr. Stone was convicted last year on seven charges related to lying to Congress about his dealings with the president and WikiLeaks — the platform publishing Russian hacked emails beneficial to the Trump campaign — and witness tampering.

Late that same evening, the president tweeted in outrage, calling the recommendation “a miscarriage of justice.” The next morning, at Barr’s urging, the department reversed course and recommended a more lenient sentence, using language so unusual for the DOJ that it looked like it could have been written by Stone himself.

Barr claims he had planned to intervene in the case before reading the president’s tweet, but he does not deny his personal involvement. It is exceedingly rare for attorneys general to overrule the sentencing recommendation of their career prosecutors. Doing so in a case involving the president’s own wrongdoing may be unprecedented.

As a result, the career prosecutors on the case demonstrated something in short supply in the White House but abundant among public servants — moral courage. One by one, they withdrew from the case, and one resigned altogether.

By the end of the week, reports emerged that Barr had ordered the review of other “politically sensitive” criminal cases, including that of President Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators to cover up the nature of his own interactions with the Russians. This follows yet another Barr-ordered review intended to sow doubt about intelligence community findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help then-candidate Trump, and a nearly successful effort to cover up the whistleblower complaint that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

These interventions by Barr to benefit the president have profound implications for the rule of law and our democracy. With a willing attorney general and compliant congressional Republicans, Trump is attempting to utilize the instruments of justice for his political benefit, something that would give him immense power to punish and harass his political opponents and protect his friends.

We cannot let that succeed.

Institutions are only as strong as the people who protect them. Public servants, at personal cost, stepped forward in the impeachment inquiry and in the wake of the Stone sentencing reversal. Judges have also demonstrated a vital independence from this lawless president.

Congress must also do its part through vigorous oversight, and also by enacting a new set of reforms to prevent presidential abuses akin to those passed after Watergate. Work on these is already underway.

The president has continually taken advantage of the slow judicial review process to delay oversight of his administration. In response, Congress should enact legislation to expedite judicial review of congressional subpoenas, an idea House Republicans favored unanimously under President Obama.

There is also a clear need to legislate a stronger firewall between the Department of Justice and the White House, one secured by more than regulations or norms. One first step was introduced by my fellow House impeachment manager, Hakeem Jeffries, to require logging and disclosure of White House contacts with DOJ. But more will be required to prevent an unethical president from initiating or interfering in cases that involve the president’s enemies, allies or family members.

Along these lines, I have introduced legislation to constrain abuse of the pardon power. President Trump has repeatedly dangled pardons to his associates as they face federal criminal investigations. The bill would ensure that, in the event the president issues a pardon in a case related to him or his family members, the complete investigative files would be provided to Congress to ensure he could not obtain the corrupt benefit of covering up his own misconduct.

Some of these reforms may not become law while Trump remains in office, but that must not stop us from getting started. The future of our democracy depends on it.