As the Boy Scouts of America consider lifting a ban on openly gay scouts, here’s a look at Right Wing Watch’s collection of recent claims from the Religious Right on what might happen if that shift were to occur. Relying on outlandish predictions and harmful lies, right-wing personalities are linking gays in the Boy Scouts to everything from sexual abuse to North Korean nuclear threats.
Here are highlights of Right Wing Watch’s recent reporting on right-wing opposition to lifting the ban on gay members in the Boy Scouts:
5. Swanson: Allowing Gays in Boy Scouts Like Letting Serial Killers Teach Preschool (February 2013)
There was no way that Generations Radio hosts Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner were going to miss out on the debate over whether the Boy Scouts should allow openly gay members. Allowing openly gay Boy Scout leaders, Swanson says, is no different than letting convicted child molesters or serial killers teach preschool. The Boy Scouts, Buehner warns, are not far from “opening a new summer camp called Camp Sandusky.”
4. Keyes: Gay Boy Scouts Will Force Other Scouts to be Gay (May 2013)
Former ambassador and perennial presidential candidate Alan Keyes argues that if the Boy Scouts change the policy, then straight Boy Scouts will be forced to acquiesce to the “sexual advances” of their gay peers in order to avoid being “viciously accused of unrighteous bigotry.” Once they deny their faith and turn gay, Keyes warns, they will “slip into a whirlpool of compulsive sensual indulgence, moral guilt and spiritual confusion.”
Talk show host Buster Wilson, formerly of the American Family Association, claims that gay men sometimes have “as many as a hundred or more partners” and will put Boy Scouts in “compromising” situations. He even argues that a ban on gay scouts is a good thing because excluding them will prevent them from being bullied and contemplating suicide. Wilson warns that if the U.S. continues to “succumb to the pressure of political correctness from the forces on the side of the homosexual agenda,” then God may “rain down destruction” on America as he did to Sodom.
2. Santorum: Dropping Gay Ban Will 'Murder' the Boy Scouts (February 2013)
Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum warns that ending the Boy Scouts’ national ban on gay members could kill the group, and the group’s board would have “its fingerprints on the murder weapon.”
Fred Luter, president of the Southern Baptist Convention: “I would not be surprised that at the time when we are debating same-sex marriage, at a time when we are debating whether or not we should have gays leading the Boy Scout movement, I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that we have a mad man in Asia who is saying some of the things that he’s saying.”
