Family Research Council (FRC) president Tony Perkins is praising a recent open anti-gay letter to the Boy Scouts of America signed by over 60 Texas Republican elected officials. The letter, which originally appeared on a website run by Texas Values, say the signatories “strongly encourage the Boy Scouts of America to stick with their decades of support for family values and moral principles.”
READ:Â Rick Perry: Boy Scouts Reduce Teen Pregnancy, So No Gay Boy Scouts
They signers of the letter claim:
“Capitulating to the liberal social agenda … undermines the very principles of scouting.”
“Gov. Rick Perry, and now over 60 fellow elected officials in Texas, are showing the Boy Scouts that they’re not alone in standing for their values,” Perkins says via a statement. “As leaders from the Boy Scouts organization meet in Texas, we hope that seeing the solidarity of so many Texas leaders will encourage them to reaffirm their current policy on homosexuality.”
“Thanks to the organizing efforts of Texas Values, the Lone Star State’s vocal support of the Boy Scouts and parental rights is being heard.
“Last year the Boy Scouts confirmed that ‘the vast majority of the parents’ of Boy Scouts reserve to themselves the right to introduce and give guidance on sexual topics. Gov. Perry and these Texas officials understand that, and are putting parents’ rights first, and we applaud them for it.”
Texas Values, which has an online petition to ask the Scouts to remain anti-gay, is a group apparently affiliated with or formed from the Liberty Institute.
The full text of the open letter reads:
As state elected officials, we strongly encourage the Boy Scouts of America to stick with their decades of support for family values and moral principles. Capitulating to the liberal social agenda not only undermines the very principles of scouting, but sets the stage for the erosion of an organization that has defined the American experience for generations of young men.
Scouts begin each meeting with an Oath, “to do my duty, to God and my country, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.†By caving in to pressure from the social left, the national leadership would violate each of those principles.
Worse still, the contemplated national policy would throw to the wolves chartering organizations and scout troops that choose to stick with scouting’s historic and legally protected policy. Left to defend themselves from legal attacks, we fear many churches and other entities will choose to simply abandon scouting altogether – it will be the safer course, and one hastening the organization’s eventual collapse.
Rest assured that while adopting this ill-considered and wrongly devised policy might earn temporary kudos, you can never do enough to appease those who want to see the scouts robbed of their moral authority.
We urge you to be morally and physically strong. We urge you to protect all that scouting has been, and all that it can remain.
Curious the 6o-plus Republicans aren’t urging the Boy Scouts to “be morally and physically straight.”
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