Fox News’ new contributor Erick Erickson responds to the Boy Scouts’ change in their policy about gay scouts.
The Boy Scouts of America voted Thursday to allow openly gay scouts to join the organization, to take effect January 1.
On the opening day of its two-day meeting in Dallas, Texas, roughly 1,400 volunteer leaders from scouting’s 270 councils approved the BSA’s proposal. However, the organization’s ban on gay adults will continue.
Outside the conference center where the national council was meeting, dozens of Christian conservatives waved flags and demonstrated against the change.
“We’re trying to uphold traditional values,” Bill Lizzio, a 56-year-old scout leader from Tennessee, told The New York Times.
There is still work to be done. We need to allow LGB adults to participate. We need to allow trans scouts and leaders. We need to change the homophobic culture of organizations rooted in conservative values.
But for now, we rejoice in this small, but significant victory. Way to go, guys.
In this segment from MSNBC’s The Cycle, host Krystal Ball talks with her 5-year-old daughter Ella about what it means to get married. Glenn Beck called the video “cringe-inducing” and other conservatives have called it exploitative and compared it to child abuse. I think it’s pretty clear those judgements aren’t true. What say you?
Allyson Robinson, a trans woman and executive director for OutServe-SLDN, hung this sign up in an Arizona public restroom stall in response to this preposterous bill. Succinct and simple; what’s so hard to understand? (via The Advocate)
Feel-good story of the day:
Residents of Everman, Texas held a “fence-painting party” this weekend to restore a fence that was covered in homophobic graffiti targeting their gay neighbors.
The couple in question was turned away from a catering hall recently because they are gay. The story received a fair amount of publicity, and their fence was vandalized a week later. But their neighbors united to help them out:
First, the graffiti that said “Burn FAG” was turned into Born FABulous. But then the wood fence was painted white.
The police chief and the fire chief and his wife also stopped by to show their support. The police chief assured the couple that the department is keeping an eye on the house.
About 20 friends and neighbors helped with the painting. Hudgins said additional people who were walking or biking stopped when they saw the group painting — withe some having a hot dog and a drink and painting for five or 10 minutes.
Stories like this warm my heart. There really are good people everywhere.
When her spouse was killed in Afghanistan, Tracy Johnson drove across town to her mother-in-law’s house — clutching her marriage certificate — so she could hear the Army’s formal notification. No one from the military came to her door.
She later watched as the American flag that cloaked the coffin of her spouse, Donna Johnson, was offered, not to her, but to Donna Johnson’s mother – the next of kin, as U.S. law stipulates. She was denied death benefits, she said, that are standard issue to heterosexual spouses of service members who die in action: free health care, tuition assistance, and monthly indemnity compensation of about $1,200.
(via ’What’s right is right’: Widowed lesbian pushes for equal military benefits)
Why the “government shouldn’t be in any marriage therefore I don’t support gay marriage” argument is a load of bullshit.
This is the single most fucked up thing I have seen in a long time.
