Being a Boy Scout

The Supreme Court may have done us all a favor in its decision by pointing out the absurdity and corruption of a "private" organization in the year 2000 that rejoices in its discrimination against people on the basis of who they are. We look to the nine geniuses on the Supreme Court for the kind of august adjudication of issues we saw in the Boy Scout case. I mean, thank God for the Supreme Court! Finally we know who can be a Boy Scout?and more importantly, who cannot be a Scout! Makes you wish they hadn't stopped with gays in defining who's good enough to be a Boy Scout. Why not deny membership to, say, nonresident immigrants? For that matter, why not allow membership only to American citizens born in the United States? Hell, why not deny membership to nonbelievers? Since the Boy Scouts are a "private" organization, can't they discriminate on religious grounds as well?

For all of the moral posturing by the Boy Scouts, precious little has been said about what it has been like to be a Boy Scout. For good or ill, I come from the Boy Scout generation. It's been more important in the past two elections to establish your Boy Scout credentials than your war record. The election between Gore and Bush is yet another Boy Scout vs. Boy Scout test of wills. Back in the days when giants like Bush and Gore strode the plains, clad only in jock straps, scarves and merit badges, carrying the message of righteousness and justice imbued in them by the Boy Scout Oath, what was Scouting really like?

For starters, in many states in this country, Boy Scouts were segregated by race into "white troops" and "colored troops." I remember those days down in Georgia and Kentucky and Tennessee. I guess it would take the geniuses on the Supreme Court to parse the language of the Boy Scout Oath for us, but apparently back then, the Boy Scout Oath could be read to forbid "race-mixing."

My earliest memories of Boy Scouts have to do with race and with religion. It was the summer of 1957, and our Boy Scout Troop from Oberammergau, Germany, attended an international Boy Scout "Camp-Out" somewhere in Bavaria. Oberammergau was an unusually small Army post?no more than 60-70 officers and enlisted men, so we had a very small Boy Scout troop. When we arrived at the big Camp-Out, we were immediately questioned by other Scouts who were sons of American military officers: Are you a Catholic troop, or a Protestant troop? Well, this was something that had never come up. In our small troop, there were Protestant kids and Jewish kids and Catholic kids. We didn't know about religious segregation among Boy Scout troops.

Sunday morning came along, and now that we were mixed in with other troops, our Scoutmasters ordered the Catholic kids to march off in one direction with other Catholics, while Protestants were ordered to follow the Scoutmaster to the Big Protestant Service somewhere over a nearby hill. And what of the Jews? Well, the religious needs of Jews weren't real high up there on the list of priorities in the Boy Scout Oath. The Jews were gathered into a small group and told to pick which service they would attend: Protestant or Catholic. Nice of the Scouts. They actually gave the Jews a choice.

I can recall with great clarity my later years in Scouting?in particular, a rather fussy Scoutmaster who saw it as his duty to come around to our house the day after Scout meetings and report on every little detail of misbehavior by me or my brother. We didn't "listen to others." We "spoke out of turn." We were "disruptive." It was like having your third-grade teacher come home with you and sit around the dinner table reporting on your day at school. Why my parents put up with his invasion of their privacy, much less ours, I don't know. Maybe it was because the fussy Scoutmaster was a colonel, and my father was seriously outranked: he was a lowly major. The Boy Scouts have always taught deference to rank, after all. Comes before understanding of others and the differences inherent among human beings.

My last contact with Scouting was in 1969 at Fort Benning, GA. The United Way Fund of Columbus, GA, the hellhole of a redneck town just off-post, had a fundraising drive that fall, and naturally the command at Benning tried to make it "mandatory" to contribute 10 percent of a month's pay, even though the damned United Way was a charity, not a tax. Just for the hell of it, another lieutenant and I decided to go down to the United Way office and check their books to see where our contributions might go. Not one African-American organization in Columbus received a dime of United Way money. There were more than a dozen Boy Scout troops in Columbus. Four or five of them, in the spirit of the Boy Scout Oath, were segregated African-American troops. All of the white Boy Scout troops received United way funds. Not a single one of the African-American troops did. The Boy Scouts weren't running the United Way in Columbus, but the same "town fathers" on the board of the United Way were doubtlessly leaders in the "Scouting community." It was all of a piece back then in the deep South.

The Boy Scout Oath was a wonderful thing in those days, upholding the "values" of the city of Columbus, GA, "values" the Supreme Court presumably wanted to help keep sacred and clean and pure by keeping those awful gay people at arm's length. Well, somebody has to uphold our values. May as well be five of the nine geniuses on the highest court in our land. Remember the Boy Scout decision when you vote on Election Day. It's our oath vs. their oath. I know which one I'm taking.

Lucian K. Truscott IV wrote the introduction for Jefferson's Children, a book about the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, published this month by Random House.