Spilled Milk: Scouting for My Son’s America
This post is part of a series of Spilled Milk columns by Emmy Award-winning writer and producer William Lucas Walker that chronicle his journey through parenthood. Spilled Milk, which originates in The Huffington Post, appears on these pages on Saturdays.
 Sometimes it’s tricky explaining America to an 8-year-old.
When our daughter was that age, the trick was explaining marriage. Why even though she and fifty guests had gotten all dressed up one hot June day and witnessed her parents’ very real, very legal wedding, just a few months later voters saw fit to ban marriages like ours in California. Just as they had in 48 other states. She found this upsetting. We did too.
It took five years, but all that finally got sorted out by the Supreme Court, and now marriage for all is once again safe and legal in California, as well as 16 other states and counting. Not that Elizabeth is paying much attention lately. She’s 13 now. The only marriage she cares about these days is her fantasy wedding to hunktastic Chris Hemsworth, star of Thor.
Now it’s our son James who’s turned 8. This time the America I find myself having to explain is the Boy Scouts of America.
Since he was first able to toddle into our home office, James has had lots of questions about a framed black-and-white photograph that hangs next to the door. Because in it I’m a kid, like him. A prepubescent 13, smiling up at my mom as she pins an Eagle Scout award to my uniform as my Scoutmaster looks on. My dad, who rarely takes a bad picture, stands behind me wearing an expression that can only be described as… puckered.
 
“Dude, what is Pop doing with his face?” asked James a few months ago. “He looks like he’s about to lean over and kiss the back of your head.”
“There’s a lesson in this for you,” I tell my son. “He’s telling me to stand up straight. Never talk when someone’s taking your picture. It’s always a bad idea. You end up spending the next forty years in a frame looking like a fish.”
He laughs and moves on. “Did it hurt when Mimi pinned that thing on your chest?”
“Nope. It felt great.”
“Do you still have it?” I do.
I lead my son over to a bookcase in our office where my Eagle Scout pin now resides. He asks if he can hold it. I open the glass door, carefully lift it out and place it in his moist, eager palm.
 
“Wowww….”
The Eagle Award is the highest in scouting. Like most medals, it inspires awe in young boys. One of my first Scout outings was to a tiny church in Mountville, South Carolina, where I watched Monty Crisp receive his. Following tradition it was pinned on by his mother as his dad looked on, fishlike. I knew in an instant I wanted a moment just like that with my parents one day, whatever it took.
The Eagle Scout Award is a beautiful thing to behold, a majestic silver replica of our national bird suspended from a ribbon striped in red, white and blue underneath a silver scroll emblazoned with the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared.” Whenever I touch it, I half expect the eagle to start singing “God Bless America.”
I had no idea how much work, sweat, discipline and dedication, and how many years it would take to earn that thing. There’s a reason only 5 percent of all Scouts make Eagle. Sticking with it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. There were a hundred times I wanted to quit, to chuck it all and sleep in on Saturday mornings. My parents made sure I didn’t.
Family is key in scouting; my mom kept my uniform clean, sewed on my merit badges and hauled me and my pals to countless remote locations for camping trips. Then made sure I knew how to clean my pots and pans and launder my filthy clothes when I got home. My dad’s unpredictable hours as a doctor kept him from playing a regular role at our weekly meetings, but he volunteered every spring by giving free physicals to all the boys going away to Scout camp.
“Can you pin it on me,” James is asking now, holding out the medal. “The way your mom pinned it on you?”
“I can’t, buddy. The pin is broken.” But I have something else in mind.
Soon we’re upstairs, in the back of my closet, the section I call the archives. Buried in the shadows, it’s a timeline of my life, on hangers. I pull out the burgundy shirt I wore when James and his sister were born, and the black jacket with the giant red”R” on the front, awarded to writers who managed to survive the sitcom Roseanne. There’s the ACT UP t-shirt I wore to protest the AIDS crisis in New York, the Honey Bun costume from my high school production of South Pacific, and finally, at the very back, I spot what’s left of my Boy Scout uniform, the familiar khaki green shirt and matching merit badge sash.
They’re in pretty much mint condition, thanks to my mom. They were lovingly folded in tissue by her and sent back to California with me a few years ago, after one of her ruthless purges of the family attic.
In about three seconds James is in the shirt, asking what the numbers on the sleeve mean. “That was my troop number. 111.Your uncles and I were all in Troop 111.”
 
James wants to know what it was like in the Boy Scouts. I tell him about the camping trips, show him the three-fingered Scout salute, recall what I can of the Scout Law and explain how to make apple turnovers outdoors, in tin foil. As my son cradles my merit badge sash I explain how the embroidered fabric circles represent some of the skills I learned in scouting: how to paddle a canoe, sail a boat, save a swimmer from drowning, make a tourniquet from a tuxedo, tie knots. I even demonstrate two I still remember, the square knot and the bowline.
That night, James wears my merit badge sash to bed. Ever since, it’s been hanging on his bedpost.
Like his cousins — my brothers’ boys, who followed their dads into scouting– James can’t wait to become a Boy Scout. Unlike his cousins, James has not one dad but two. Which is where things get tricky.
Especially after what happened in Seattle last week. Though the Boy Scouts of America would be lucky to have James, I’m not so sure anymore that after he finds out James will have the Scouts.
I’m referring to the troop that had its Boy Scout charter revoked by the national office after refusing to fire its Scoutmaster, Geoffrey McGrath. An Eagle Scout himself, McGrath, 49, had founded the troop at the request of his church, Rainier Beach United Methodist. He accepted the challenge, he said, because he loves scouting and because the low-income and immigrant children in his area of south Seattle had few after-school activities.
After discovering that McGrath is openly gay and married, the Boy Scouts of America demanded that the sponsoring church fire him. When the church refused, the troop’s Scout charter was revoked.
The Boy Scouts of America has always had a problem with the gays. Not that they haven’t made progress. The Scouts and the gays. The B.S.A. allows gay Scouts now, having last year discontinued their delightful practice of kicking them out and stripping them of their awards. Gay Scoutmasters though? That’s still a big no-no. Sending a clear red, white and blue message that being gay is somehow inconsistent with Boy Scout values.
What happened in Seattle might never have occurred had the leadership of the Boy Scouts of America located their nuts and decided to adopt the policy they themselves drafted themselves a year ago. A policy that would have addressed a changing America that has finally begun to acknowledge the fact that “openly gay” does not equal “Scout molestor.”
According to a draft option on the table as late as January 2013, “the chartered organizations that oversee and deliver scouting would accept membership and select leaders consistent with their organization’s mission, principles or religious beliefs,” according to Deron Smith, a spokesman for the Boy Scouts’ national organization. Individual sponsors and parents “would be able to choose a local unit which best meets the needs of their families.”
Meaning that the many Scout troops that have no problem with gay leaders — like that Methodist church in Seattle — could hire a motivated, experienced, compassionate leader like Geoffrey McGrath.
A discrimination opt-out, if you will.
For a brief moment, this gave me heart. Though not an ideal solution, I had hope that when the time came, that policy might allow our family might find a troop for our son that would welcome us all.
That hasn’t happened.Pressure from the huge block of religious organizations that sponsor so many individual Scout troops prevailed. So the ban on adult Scout leaders of the homosexual persuasion continues to be the law of the scouting land.
Meaning that when James, looking at that photo in my office and dreaming his big dream of becoming an Eagle Scout, asked his final question — “So when I’m a Scout, could you be my Scoutmaster, Daddy? Like Uncle George is part of Dawson’s troop?” There was only one way I could answer, with every parent’s universal code for no.
“We’ll see.”
James has always had a rock-solid moral compass, adhering fiercely to one particular tenet of the Boy Scout Law: “A Scout is true to his family.”
All this makes me fairly certain that when the day arrives that I have to explain to James why I could never be his Scoutmaster, he would turn his back on the whole thing. In a heartbeat.
Back in February, when he heard me discussing Arizona Senate Bill 1062 — the one that almost became law, the one that would have allowed businesses that asserted their religious beliefs to deny service to gay and lesbian customers, James asked what that meant. I told him that it would mean that if we ever visited Arizona — which we never would because that place is a furnace — there would be some restaurants that would allow him and his sister to come inside and eat their food, but not his dads.
“Are you kidding me?!” I’d never eat at a place like that!”
We haven’t had a discussion about what happened in Seattle. It’s not an issue for us yet and besides, I’m not big on crushing the dreams of my kid.
Things could change. When James is eligible to join the Scouts in two-and-a-half years… we’ll see.Â
* * * * *
 * * * * *
William Lucas Walker is an Emmy Award-winning writer and producer whose television credits include Frasier, Will & Grace and Roseanne. He co-created the critically-acclaimed Showtime comedy The Chris Isaak Show. Bill and his husband Kelly are the parents of Elizabeth and James, born in 2001 and 2005. The children were gratified by the legal marriage of their parents in 2008, an event that rescued them from a life of ruinous bastardry.Â
Spilled Milk chronicles Bill’s misadventures in Daddyland. The first recurring humor column by a gay parent to appear in a mainstream American publication, Spilled Milk has regularly landed on the front page of The Huffington Post.Â
Follow William Lucas Walker on Twitter: @WmLucasWalker, @SpilledMilkWLW or Facebook: “Spilled Milk” by William Lucas Walker.    Â
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Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon if he’s made a decision about what, if anything, he will do regarding Iran, the President told reporters, “I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final.”
“I like to make the final decisions one second before it’s due, you know, ’cause things change. I mean, especially with war, things change with war, it can go from one extreme to the other.”
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“There was no reason for Russia, Ukraine. A lot of wars, there was no reason for.”
“You look right up there,” Trump said, pointing to the wall, “I don’t know, you see the Declaration of Independence, and I say, I wonder if you, you know, the Civil War always seemed to me maybe that could have been solved without losing 600,000 plus people.”
The Declaration of Independence was America’s declaration it would no longer be ruled by England. It effectively became a declaration of war: the American Revolutionary War, or the American War of Independence, which lasted from 1775 to 1783.
By contrast, the American Civil War was fought in the following century, from 1861 to 1865, over slavery.
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Critics were quick to mock the President.
“I think we all remember our schooling, when we learned how the Declaration of Independence led to the Civil War,” snarked former journalist Landon Hall.
“As a Canadian, even I know that the Declaration of Independence has absolutely zero to do with the Civil War, what is going on down there?” asked filmmaker Robert Fantinatto.
“Does he think the Declaration of Independence was written in response to the Civil War?
What is he talking about?” asked attorney Robyn J Leader.
Watch the video below or at this link.
Trump: “You look right up there. I don’t know, see the Declaration of Independence and I say, ‘I wonder if you know the Civil War. It always seemed to me maybe that could have been solved without losing 600,000 plus people.’” pic.twitter.com/tKaPrvERXA
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) June 18, 2025
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Image via Reuters
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Calling General Haugh’s dismissal “sudden and inexplicable” and “deeply concerning,” U.S. Senator Jackie Rosen (D-NV) told Secretary Hegseth it “raises significant questions about the decision-making process,” and “its potential consequences.”
“Public reports indicate that the removal of General Haugh, who has served his country proudly, has been influenced by social media influencer, an influencer— a personality on social media, Laura Loomer—spreads conspiracy theories. She’s been denounced even by Republicans,” Senator Rosen charged. “And the idea that any leaders within our agency responsible for out nation’s security—somebody would be dismissed based on the advice of a social media influencer is alarming to say the least. It’s surely not how we should be running our military.”
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Senator Rosen demanded to know if Hegseth was “consulted” regarding the dismissal of General Haugh.
“Well, Senator, I would not advise believing everything you read in the media,” was Secretary Hegseth’s response.
After a heated back-and-forth, Hegseth declared, “I’m the decision-maker for the department. And we all serve at the pleasure of the President, and we have the prerogative to make those decisions.”
Refusing to state specifically that he personally relieved general Haugh, Hegseth served up a more generic response.
“Anyone at that level who was relieved would be relieved by the Secretary of Defense,” he stated.
Hegseth also refused to respond when asked if there was a specific justification for General Haugh’s dismissal.
“Uh, Ma’am, we all serve at the pleasure of the President and the President deserves the type of Commanders and advisers that he thinks will best equip…to accomplish the mission.”
Hegseth also refused to say if he discussed dismissing Haugh with Laura Loomer.
“I don’t discuss who I talk about anything with, but ultimately, this is my decision, and he serves at the pleasure of the president, and that’s why he’s no longer there,” was the Secretary’s reply.
After another question, Hegseth told Senator Rosen, “Uh, I believe your time is up, Senator.”
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“And I don’t appreciate the smirk, sir. You are the Secretary of Defense.”
Watch below or at this link.
Rosen: Did you discuss General Haugh’s dismissal with Laura Loomer prior to his removal?
Hegseth: I don’t discuss who I talk about anything with..
Rosen: Do you believe it’s appropriate for any social media personality to influence decisions in your department?
Hegseth: Your… pic.twitter.com/39DgM8VtU9
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 18, 2025
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Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion upholding the ban, known as SB1.
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“This case presents an easy question: whether SB1’s ban on certain medications, applicable only if used in a manner ‘inconsistent with . . . sex,’ contains a sex classification,” Justice Sotomayor concluded. “Because sex determines access to the covered medications, it clearly does. Yet the majority refuses to call a spade a cspade. Instead, it obfuscates a sex classification that is plain on the face of this statute, all to avoid the mere possibility that a different court could strike down SB1, or categorical healthcare bans like it.”
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