SPEECH AND IDEAS ARE PROTECTED LIBERTIES

Remember back in grade school, someone would say to you, your mother is a xxxx!  And then you tried to beat him up!

Children naturally take words over-seriously, not knowing that freedom of speech allows a person to say almost anything he wants, including, your mother is a . . . . !

Actually, freedom of speech flows out of freedom of ideas.  This is a connection that the Catholic Church has never understood.  It tries to make certain thoughts, "sinful."  Maybe, the priests succeeded in convincing people that this was the case for the first 1700 years of Christianity, but then came the French Enlightenment, and the idea that ideas could be sinful or harmful was tossed on the dung heap of discredited belief.

It is amazing to think that words still are the basis for hurting or killing people.   Or that insults should be met with a gun or a sword, especially when the insults are imagined as being directed to a religious prophet.

CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MORMON CHURCH'S INFLUENCE ON BOY SCOUTS' DECISION TO BAN ELEVEN YEAR OLD BOYS SHOWING HOMOSEXUAL TENDENCIES

The Boy Scouts of America, in what was crafted to sound high-minded and principled, announced that it would refuse to accept boys who showed homosexual tendencies or publicly admitted they were gay.

How old does a boy have to be join the Scouts?  Eleven or twelve?  So if he has "homosexual tendencies, the Scouts will not allow him to join?

How about some equal protection for eleven-year olds?  Who is to say that another person has homosexual tendencies?  And even if he does, why are the Scouts afraid of him?

Is it because the Boy Scouts of America have a problem with straight adult leaders who have abused boys in their charge?  Perhaps the Boy Scouts are trying to deflect justified criticism that the organization has not done nearly enough to protect young boys from sexual adult predators.

Nancy Goldstein writes in The Guardian that the Boy Scouts share many similarities with the  Catholic Church when it comes to treatment of sexual predation among their leaders.  They try to conceal, deny and cover up.  What they don't do is allow the public to see evidence of their acceptance of predators in their organization.

Goldstein writes that the decision of the Boy Scouts to ban children who they perceive to show homosexual tendencies stems from the pressure of two religious groups, the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church.

Writes Goldstein:

"Ignore all of the Scouts' official mumbo-jumbo about the (unidentified) leaders who comprised the special committee of top Scout leaders that made this decision, especially the part about their alleged "diversity of perspectives and opinions". As the LA Times notes, what's really happening here is a business decision about the organization's sustainability, driven by the influence of two of the Scouts' most powerful benefactors: the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches. About 400,000 of the 2.7 million members left in the dwindling organization, "belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", which "encourages members to become involved in the Boy Scouts, and has its own section on the Boy Scouts of America webpage. "