John Stemberger appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show to discuss the looming vote over whether to allow openly gay youth in the Boy Scouts of America, where he urged listeners to “pray that the delegates vote no.” He warned that the Boy Scouts will commit “suicide” if they allow openly gay members, whom he said will be “segregated” and put “in separate tents” from the other boys.
Scouting does not discriminate currently, we don’t care about sexual orientation don’t want sex to even be involved with the program. It’s about camping, tying knots, canoes, swimming and letting boys be boys. We don’t need to have this thing where we’re identifying—because you know what the irony of this whole thing is that if they make this change, not only will it devastate the program in terms of the people that will leave and the finances but the very thing that gays want is to be treated the gays but scouting is going to have to segregate them in separate tents just from a liability standpoint. They’re not going to be able to put openly gay boys—I mean you wouldn’t put boys and girls together in the same tent, nor would you put a boy who is attracted to another boy tenting with him in the same quarters. So the very thing they want to be equal, they’re not going to be equal, they’re going to be segregated. It’s a mess, scouting is playing suicide and we pray that the delegates vote no.
He said that gays will intentionally join the scouts if the ban is lifted because they “either have interest in the other boys or to promote their agenda,” which he said “will utterly destroy the program.”
What they’re thinking of is a little boy saying, ‘oh I think I’m attracted to guys, I think I’m gay,’ well that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the sixteen, seventeen-year-old openly gay activist from the local campus that is there for ill-motives: there as a plaintiff, there as a person to either have interest in the other boys or to promote their agenda. That is going to be the problem, not the boys—we have those boys already, scoutmasters take them in and we deal with them, we talk with them, we work with them. It’s the activists that we’re concerned with and that’s why we think sex and politics have absolutely no place in scouting, it will utterly destroy the program.
