The Herald’s Margery Eagan as a nice portrait of 87-ear-old Marshall Sloane, founder of Century Bank and life-long Boy Scout, who flew to Texas last week to vote to end to the Scouts’ ban on gay troop members.
Despite at least 3,600 calls to his answering machine, every one urging him to keep the ban, Marshall Sloane voted with the 61 percent majority that ended it Thursday. …
…“I was so proud. For three days straight maybe 50 people got up to give their point of view. This was very emotional. Plenty of old-timers threatened to quit,” said Sloane, believing himself to be the second oldest old-timer in the hall. “But there was no yelling, no screaming, no nastiness. For it or against it, when you finished speaking, you got a hand.”
I’m so proud of this guy. What a surprise that he’s from Newton!
So, now, one of two things. A straight scout has to share his tent on a camp-out with a gay scout all night in the dark. Wouldn’t appeal to me. Or two gay scouts share a tent and pleasure each other while the other scouts have to listen to their moaning. Not a pretty picture. The next step, of course, will be the scout leaders, and we know how well them being in positions of authority over boys worked out in the Catholic Church or at Penn State.
@Barry, as usual, you drew exactly the wrong lesson from the pedophilia cover-ups in the Catholic Church and at Penn State. Scouts have been camping out in the same tent with gay scouts for generations, whether they knew it or not. The only difference now is that the gay scouts can be who they are without feeling they have to hide. Pedophilia is not the same as being gay. Pedophiles sexually exploit children. Pedophiles who exploit boys may also exploit girls and do not necessarily identify as gay.
Using your logic, clearly the real problem is that most pedophiles are men. Perhaps we should pass laws to keep all men away from children entirely because there is a chance they will sexually exploit children. That would definitely solve most of the problem.
Ted, I was hoping you’d respond.
Putting gay men in tents (oh, and barracks, etc.) with other men is like putting me, and most normal men, in a tent with the girl scouts or in a women’s barracks. Sexuality is ingrained in people and most active in younger people. That’s good, because it leads to reproduction and continuation of the species when done properly. But it’s risky.
You and your other progressive allies are living in a fantasy world, a world where you act as if men and women (or gay men and men) can be put in certain situations and nothing will happen. All in the name of your definition of civil rights.
Today, there is a complaint about sexual assaults in the military. So, you and your progressive friends blame it on bad guys who can’t control their urges. I blame it on the naivete of people thinking they can put women in close service with men, even now on the front lines in combat, and tempt people who have certain sexual urges and they won’t act upon them. And, yes, the women have those urges as well, but the men are more immediate in their urges, and more powerful physically, so the women complain.
Sorry, Ted. You’re using the law to create a messed up society that is destined to fail. It will fail. It may take a number of years to completely realize the downside of your naivite, but it will come. We can see it already.
And you won’t have the honesty to admit that you were wrong.
So Barry, how come women and gays serving equally in the Israeli Army seems to be working out just fine for the past decade or more? Is it just an issue with American men and their “urges”?
Barry, what exactly is Tricia’s proof for her last statement?
I find that Israeli left has turned the Israeli Defense Forces into a petri dish of social engineering, with the usual results. Then again, the American left has done the same with the U.S. Armed Forces.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/6699#.UaQklNKkrBt
I do have to disagree with you about Ted’s “progressive friends and allies”. Ted and his friends are many things but what they are doing is most certainly not progressive in anyway (unless progress is defined as undermining the ability of the US and Israel to defend themselves against their enemies).
A link to an op-ed – an opinion – is your “proof” to back up *your* opinion?
Barry, you think an awful lot about sex. And you seem to think everyone else is constantly on the make. Maybe it’s you. As for most gay men, you have nothing to fear. They’re just not that into you.
Ted, your immature and offensive comments are not constructive. True, they aren’t into me. I’m too old, and I project clear signals that I’m not interested. But, every gay man will tell you he realized he was gay because he was attracted to MEN, not that he was attracted to gay men. Isolated quarters with vulnerable youth (and showers with Sandusky after a football game) is a different situation from normal social interaction, and that’s my key point. Two boys in a tent all night, when one is free to express his homosexuality, is different from working with someone in an office environment.
And, yes, as you said, probably scouts have been camping with homosexual scouts for a long time without realizing it, but at a time when homosexuality was in the closet and they did all they could to hide that fact or the other scouts would have beaten them to a pulp.
And, Tricia, what proof do you have that mixing women and homosexuals in the IDF is ” working out just fine”? What are the criteria? In whose opinion is it working out fine? There are many ways to stucture a study, if one was even done, and many ways to bias the results in a direction you want to.
I’m an Eagle Scout. Back then, I must have missed the Sex Merit Badge requirement where orientation might have mattered. It didn’t matter. If anything, the ban made things more difficult for friends who did come out later. As for the false “gay=pederast” culture that keeps the Scout Leader ban in place– well, shame on the BSA, still.
Barry said:
Yes, Barry, I am keenly aware of your nostalgia for the “good old days” when gay kids would get beaten to a pulp. Thank you for showing us all the way to the truth and the light.
Your antideluvian views of sexuality and homosexuality in particular fail to acknowledge or even recognize that sex is about mutual attraction. Gay men are not into you because you are not into them. Put another way, they are not automatically attracted to anyone who happens to have a penis.
Pedophiles are attracted to children, who are too young to consent and can be easily exploited by an older person. Indeed, the relationship itself is exploitative by the very nature of it. That is why pedophilia is a sickness. And it is precisely the coverup and secrecy in our institutions, like the BSA, the Catholic Church and Penn State, that allow pedophiles to exploit children. It is not because they are gay that they sexually exploit children, it is because they are pedophiles.
Hurray for Marshall Sloane, who shows great wisdom comes with age, compassion and experience.
Thanks Ted for bringing this back to the intended point of this thread and Eagan’s column. The Sloane family has done so much for our community.
Barry’s comments, on the other hand, remind us how far we still have to go.
Well played, Ted!
Ted, as is typical of your ilk, you twisted what I said. I didn’t say I would beat up a gay scout or that I condoned it. I was only replying to your presenting evidence of how it’s okay because there have been homosexual scouts in the past. The past was a different environment.
Personally, I don’t care if a man likes men. I do consider it a misuse of his sexual apparatus, and a sort of emotional disorder. For that, I feel sorry for him. But, I don’t, as you seem to do, place homosexuality, transgenderism, or whatever other nuance you can come up with on an equal footing with one man-one woman heterosexual relationships. You can’t seem to see the difference.
And, as I’ve said before, I don’t like the fact that people like you, who have attained some political clout, use it to indoctrinate our kids with programs in the public schools. I should be free to feel as I do about abnormalities and not have some reactionary like you telling my kids and other people that I just don’t get it, that I am “homophobic” or a “hater” or a “bigot”, when in fact the most virulent hate speech comes from the people you support, and where my opinion is much more rational than yours, even though yours has attained some popularity. Remember Perez Hilton’s vile attacks when some beauty contestant didn’t agree with his stand? This goes on all the time.
Greg, you can cheer all you want, but you’re cheering for an ultimately losing team. As I said, it will take a while, but people will wise up to the scam that’s been perpetrated. This is Newton, and you have a lot of support. Not so in the more sane parts of the US.
Barry, I don’t know who Perez Hilton is, so I had to Google him. What does a right thinking, moral, upstanding citizen like you even care what Perez Hilton thinks? Are you secretly following him on his website? Methinks thou doth protest too much!
Seriously, though, you are entitled to your beliefs, as wrong as I think they are. Whether they are more “rational” is certainly in the eye of the beholder. But homosexuality and transgender has existed throughout human history and throughout the animal kingdom, for that matter. The God I believe in does not make mistakes, therefore, I sincerely believe that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons must be part of the spectrum of human sexuality that S/He intended. And the God I believe in also wants us to treat each other as we would want to be treated, so the very thought of anyone living in fear of being beaten to a pulp as an inducement to stay closeted and hidden from folks such as you, who are prejudiced against them, is abhorrent to me. Just my $0.02.
As for using my position in the community to “indoctrinate” young people in the public schools, I dare say I am in the position of having been privileged to be elected and serve five terms as a representative of my community precisely because of my views, not in spite of them. What you see is what you get with me. I believe that discrimination against LGBT person is wrong. And I am sure anyone who has voted for me over the years knows and expects that from me.
I’ve never been a parent so I may be way off on this post (feel free to correct me). This all based around the Boy’s Scouts? The Boy’s Scout’s age is between 7-10 years old, how many 10 year old children do you know that understand sexuality and Barry’s “sexual aparatus” theory. While, I applaud Marshall Sloane for reforming and going up against the status quo, I never saw this as a serious issue.
Barry, do you have the same problems with adult teacher’s teaching children?
@Tom Sheff
Cub Scouts = 7-10, Boy Scouts 11-17
Thanks Jerry. I still never saw this as an issue.
Ted, you may not know who Perez Hilton is, but your reply smacks of his tactics. Again I never said anything that would justify your saying “so the very thought of anyone living in fear of being beaten to a pulp as an inducement to stay closeted and hidden from folks such as you, who are prejudiced against them, is abhorrent to me. ”
Ted, the more I hear the hate speech, lies and garbage that you folks use to elicit sympathy for a misguided cause, the more I know I’m on the right side. I don’t advocate being closeted. I advocate intelligent understanding of the differences between people and acting in accordance with those differences.
Yes, you’re elected because of your views. This is Newton, as I said, with Barney Frank, Ruth Balser, Kay Khan, David Cohen, and others. Provincetown would probably love Newton’s choices. But most of the US sees Massachusetts as a joke, an example of screwed up people.
The God I believe in also created Adolph Hitler, Osama binLaden, Jeffrey Dahmer, Tamarlan Tsarnaev, and a lot of other bad people. Does that mean they are doing what He wants? That’s a tired and misleading argument for accepting GLBT behavior as of equal value to one-man one-woman relationships.
In fact, the God I believe in gave us a Bible telling us what is right and what is wrong with the knowledge that we are capable of doing right if we choose to, even if the pull to do wrong seems difficult. That’s what free choice is about. You really don’t accept living according to the dictates of any God. You’d rather follow your own personal values, which seem to me not to be always correct.
@Barry, we are never going to reach accord on this, so please allow me to conclude by saying that it takes all kinds to make a world. Ten years ago, when the Supreme Judicial Court gave its imprimatur to same sex marriage, Massachusetts was alone and the majority of Americans opposed equal marriage. Today, eleven other states and the District of Columbia have adopted equal marriage and a majority of Americans, and a wide majority of younger Americans, supports it. As the Reverend Theodore Parker said, and many have repeated, the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice. The times they are a changin’ my friend, and with all due respect, I believe you will find that you are on the wrong side of that history.
Time will tell, Ted, but I think you’ll ultimately be proven wrong. I don’t know how long it will take. Perhaps it will happen about the time people regret the tattoos they put all over their bodies because it’s a fad, or the wearing of pant waists around their knees, or the legalization of all kinds of drugs and gambling casinos, along with the legalization of homosexual marriage. But the time will come when this screwed-up society realizes that it went way off track.
I don’t know Barry. Tattoos probably predate the institution of marriage.
Peace, brother.
True about tattoos, but they were associated, I believe, with pagans and idol worshipers, not followers of the Torah or the New Testament. It’s explicitly prohibited in the Torah. Haven’t we “progressed” from paganism and idolatry, or are we, as it seems to me, “regressing” to them? Ted, that’s what I think is really what’s happening now.