An Open Letter From an Eagle Scout
to the National Executive Board,
the Boy Scouts of America
by Nathan A.Finn
Dear Friends,
For as long as I can remember I have loved the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). I was fundamentally shaped by the decade I spent as a Scout. Many of my closest friends and my younger brother were fellow Scouts. My father, who will always be my first and most influential role model, served for many years as our assistant scoutmaster. Besides my father, three of the men I most admired during my high school years were two scoutmasters and a district executive. Outside of my parents and my local church, Scouting taught me almost everything I learned as a young man about honor, virtue, and leadership. To this day, I can recite from memory the Scout Oath and the Scout Law. I became an Eagle Scout on April 7, 1994.
Now in my mid-thirties, I have continued to appreciate the Scouts and have looked forward to the day when my own sons are old enough to become Tiger Cubs. As our nation has changed over the years, in many ways for the worse, Scouting has remained a beacon pointing to a better way. The BSA is one of the few non-sectarian mediating institutions in our society that instills traditional morality, promotes reverence toward God, champions an integrity-driven understanding of character development, and cultivates an honorable patriotism. Scouting has always been a decisively conservative organization, in the best sense of that term, emphasizing abiding principles over passing trends.
In recent weeks, I have been troubled by the news that you are proposing lifting the membership restriction on open homosexuals. This after many years of arguing, I think correctly, that the homosexual lifestyle is inconsistent with the Scout Oath and Scout Law, particularly the admonition for Scouts to be “morally straight” and “clean” in their thoughts and actions.
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