The Atlantic has a beautiful piece about two men who used the Scout Law as part of the wedding vows:
For us, earning our Eagle was about much more than learning to tie knots or build a fire in the rain. Although those are important skills scouts learn along the way, at its core, the Boy Scouts is about imparting the amorphous but critical skill of leadership. The basic premise of scouting is to build a future generation of leaders, to grow a cadre of young men who embody the moral and ethical virtues of a society and have the capacity to mobilize those values for good.
That’s why there is such a push to make the movement embrace equality. It’s a great program and offers so much to its members. It’s also so prevalent, that we need to fight against such a large organization telling children they are somehow broken.
The piece continues:
As potential parents, we, too, doubt that the institution’s moral edifice can persist under a continued posture of discrimination. The chilly November weekend that we proposed to each other, we were backpacking along a lone ridge in the Massanutten mountain range when we came across the only other group of people braving the cold that weekend—a scout troop from Virginia. After they passed, we pondered what role, if any, the Boy Scouts would play in our lives if we ended up adopting a son. We resented the idea that a child of ours would be told, from day one, that his parents were morally deficient — so much so that they could not be trusted to participate in the day-to-day activities of scouts.
It’s a great article, please have a read if you have a few minutes.
All my best,
Mike
