From the San Francisco Chronicle:
“The Boy Scouts had to suffer the consequences for sticking by their moral values,” said Eugene Grant, president of the Portland, Ore., Cascade Pacific Council’s board of directors. “There’s no question” that the Scouts’ anti-gay, anti-atheist stance has cost the organization money, he said. As a result, he said, “every council has looked at ways to generate funds. . .and logging is one of them.”
According to an investigation by the Chronicle and four other Hearst papers:
- Scout councils have ordered the logging of more than 34,000 acres of forests–perhaps far more as forestry records nationwide are incomplete.
- More than 100 scout groups–one third of all Boy Scouts councils nationwide–have conducted timber harvests.
- Councils logged in or near protected wildlife habitat at least 53 times.
- Councils have authorized at least 60 clear-cutting operations and 35 salvage harvests, logging practices that some experts say harm the environment but maximize profits.
I was a Scout as a kid, and this is not the Boy Scouts that I used to know. It’s sad that an obsession with what should be an irrelevant social issue has sabotaged their core principles. We’ve seen the same thing happen with other organs of the Religious Right as churches that should be doing good works have become obsessed with gay marriage and abortion. But while many evangelicals have begun moving back toward the center–look at Creation Care–the Boy Scouts are inexplicably going the other way. Let’s just hope their vast land holdings aren’t destroyed as they they slowly implode.
