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Berserk Boy Scouts Of America Fight Terrorists, Gays, and Agnostics *
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*Go Here and Fight Back:*
*http://www.scoutingforall.org/*
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*Have The Boy Scouts Of America Gone Completely Berserk?*
First: Please read Jennifer Steinhauer's important
article. Click on title above to go there;
in today's *New York Times*, headlined "For Explorer Scouts, Good Deeds Have Whole New Meaning." New meaning, indeed.
Second: Read it again just to make sure you didn't miss any of the truly
gruesome details.
This is vigilantism passed on to youngsters who've grown up in a violent
culture so that they can barely tell the difference between crime and
laughs.
More:
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2009/05/14/have-the-boy-scouts-of-america-gone-completely-berserk.aspx
The Explorers, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts, have long
prepared teenage members to become police officers and firefighters. Since
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Explorer posts, working with local and
federal law enforcement agencies, have added programs to train members in
confronting terrorism, illegal immigration and border violence. Here,
Explorers in a drill with the Imperial County, Calif., sheriff's office
prepared to enter a building taken over by terrorists who had begun shooting
hostages.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/05/13/us/0000EXPLORERS_index.html
IMPERIAL, Calif. — Ten minutes into arrant mayhem in this town near the
Mexican border, and the gunman, a disgruntled Iraq war veteran, has already
taken out two people, one slumped in his desk, the other covered in blood on
the floor.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia [image: Explorers Train to Fight Terrorists, and More]Slide Show
Explorers
Train to Fight Terrorists, and
More
Enlarge This Image
'width=670,height=530,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')>
'width=670,height=530,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')> Todd
Krainin for The New York Times
In a training exercise run by Border Patrol agents, Explorer scouts from
Visalia, Calif., prepare to storm a “hijacked” bus. More Photos
»
The New York Times
Imperial County relies on the local criminal justice system. More
Photos >
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The responding officers — eight teenage boys and girls, the youngest 14 —
face tripwire, a thin cloud of poisonous gas and loud shots — BAM! BAM! —
fired from behind a flimsy wall. They move quickly, pellet guns drawn and
masks affixed.
“United States Border
Patrol
Put your hands up!” screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent
determination as the suspect is subdued.
It is all quite a step up from the square knot.
The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of
America
began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills
used to confront terrorism, illegal
immigration
escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the
group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as
police officers and firefighters.
“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J.
Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he
says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in
with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”
The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the
simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers
as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and
taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to
college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a
marijuana
several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous
lookout.
“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent
explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”
One participant, Felix Arce, 16, said he liked “the discipline of the
program,” which was something he said his life was lacking. “I want to be a
lawyer, and this teaches you about how crimes are committed,” he said.
Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses
compressed-air guns — known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets
— in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed
range.
“I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me
excited.”
If there are critics of the content or purpose of the law enforcement
training, they have not made themselves known to the Explorers’ national
organization in Irving, Tex., or to the volunteers here on the ground,
national officials and local leaders said. That said, the Explorers have
faced problems over the years. There have been numerous cases over the last
three decades in which police officers supervising Explorers have been
charged, in civil and criminal cases, with sexually abusing them.
Several years ago, two University of
Nebraska
justice professors published a study that found at least a dozen
cases of sexual abuse involving police officers over the last decade. Adult
Explorer leaders are now required to take an online training program on
sexual misconduct.
Many law enforcement officials, particularly those who work for the rapidly
growing Border Patrol
Department
have helped shape the program’s focus and see it as preparing the Explorers
as potential employees. The Explorer posts are attached to various agencies,
including the Federal Bureau of
Investigation
local police and fire departments, that sponsor them much the way
churches sponsor Boy Scout troops.
“Our end goal is to create more agents,” said April McKee, a senior Border
Patrol agent and mentor at the session here.
Membership in the Explorers has been overseen since 1998 by an affiliate of
the Boy Scouts called Learning for
Life
which offers 12 career-related programs, including those focused on
aviation, medicine and the sciences.
But the more than 2,000 law enforcement posts across the country are the
Explorers’ most popular, accounting for 35,000 of the group’s 145,000
members, said John Anthony, national director of Learning for Life. Since
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many
posts have taken on an emphasis of fighting terrorism and other less
conventional threats.
“Before it was more about the basics,” said Johnny Longoria, a Border Patrol
agent here. “But now our emphasis is on terrorism, illegal entry, drugs and
human smuggling.”
The law enforcement posts are restricted to those ages 14 to 21 who have a C
average, but there seems to be some wiggle room. “I will take them at 13 and
a half,” Deputy Lowenthal said. “I would rather take a kid than possibly
lose a kid.”
The law enforcement programs are highly decentralized, and each post is run
in a way that reflects the culture of its sponsoring agency and region. Most
have weekly meetings in which the children work on their law-enforcement
techniques in preparing for competitions. Weekends are often spent on
service projects.
Just as there are soccer moms, there are Explorers dads, who attend the
competitions, man the hamburger grill and donate their land for the
simulated marijuana field raids. In their training, the would-be
law-enforcement officers do not mess around, as revealed at a recent
competition on the state fairgrounds here, where a Ferris wheel sat next to
the police cars set up for a felony investigation.
Their hearts pounding, Explorers moved down alleys where there were hidden
paper targets of people pointing guns, and made split-second decisions about
when to shoot. In rescuing hostages from a bus taken over by terrorists, a
baby-faced young girl screamed, “Separate your feet!” as she moved to
handcuff her suspect.
In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said,
one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. “If we’re looking at 9/11 and
what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like,” he said, “then maybe your
role-player would look like that. I don’t know, would you call that
politically incorrect?”
Authenticity seems to be the goal. Imperial County, in Southern California,
is the poorest in the state, and the local economy revolves largely around
the criminal justice system. In addition to the sheriff and local police
departments, there are two state prisons and a large Border Patrol and
immigration enforcement presence.
“My uncle was a sheriff’s deputy,” said Alexandra Sanchez, 17, who joined
the Explorers when she was 13. Alexandra’s police uniform was baggy on her
lithe frame, her airsoft gun slung carefully to the side. She wants to be a
coroner.
“I like the idea of having law enforcement work with medicine,” she said.
“This is a great program for me.”
And then she was off to another bus hijacking.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/14explorers.html?_r=1
*Boy Scouts of America:
Religious & homosexual discrimination*
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* Quotations: [image: bullet] "No man is much good unless he believes in
God and obeys His laws. So every Scout should have religion." From the book
"Scouting for Boys" by Robert Lord Baden Powell (founder of the Scouting
movement). [image: bullet] "The Boy Scouts of America maintain that no
member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing his
obligation to God." Boy Scouts of America, Bylaws. [image: bullet] "Any
organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough strength of
character to refuse to swear falsely." Editorial, New York Times,
1993-DEC-12, commenting on the Boy Scouts' exclusion of a young
Atheist.
bullet] "If a youth comes to a Scoutmaster and admits to doing wrong, like
stealing, lying, cheating or vandalizing, the normal procedure is to counsel
the youth privately and sympathetically...If the youth admits to being a
homosexual, the Boy Scouts' policy is to instantly terminate his association
with Scouting." Findings of fact, in a DC court case 1 [image: bullet]
"Obviously,
the Boy Scouts can accept and reject whomever they wish. But officials
should bear in mind that they, like the Christian Right and the Anglican
bishops, are disserving the nation's boys -- mere children -- when teaching
them to hate fellow humans." Bill Maxwell, St. Petersburg Times,
1998-AUG-9 [image:
bullet] "...access http://www.defendscouting.org for updated information on
the campaign to destroy the Boy Scouts." Traditional Values Coalition
Newsletter, 2001-JUN-29 (The web site has since gone offline. [image:
bullet] "The available evidence points inexorably to the conclusion that
Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual." Tim Jeal 2 [image: bullet] "...the
Boy Scouts of America have been brutally assailed as malicious monsters
because they believe that only adults who adhere to a moral code should lead
young boys." Jerry Falwell 3 [image: bullet] "When religion sanctifies
hatred, it lends to that hatred a special ferocity. Normal moral inhibitors
are erased." Johannes Cardinal Wildebrands.*
More:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/bsa.htm
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