By Marianne Stanley

The irony of this whole thing is that Jennifer Tyrrell’s removal from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is based on utter disrespect and exclusion, contrary to the founding principles of the BSA, as enunciated in 1908 by its founder, British general Robert Baden-Powell.  Two years later, Chicago publisher W. D. Boyce brought scouting to America to teach boys patriotism, courage and self-reliance.

This whole controversy revolves around two issues:  1) homosexuality and 2)  private vs. public.

Homosexuality:

Those who say homosexuality is the issue point to the part of the Scout Oath that requires a scout to be “morally straight” and to the Scout Law that requires a scout to be “clean.”  Written in the early part of the 1900s, “straight” did not connote heterosexual as it does today and “clean” only referred to bodily cleanliness that would complement the other required scout traits of being “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, thrifty, brave and reverent.”

The irony of all this is that the Boy Scouts are supposed to be about developing character and citizenship, and yet they show a lack of both by sacking a woman who happens to be homosexual (statistics say one in ten of us are) rather than heterosexual, and who had the honesty and integrity to tell them this up front.   On the other hand, while she presented such integrity to the Boy Scouts, the Boy Scouts demonstrated a lack of character in the form of smallness of mind, bigotry and intolerance, and a willingness to hurt another.

What we call morality has taken an ugly U-turn in our land.   True morality embodies ethics that insist that we respect each person, accord them their human dignity and harm no one intentionally.  We see this anti-moral morality in today’s hate-mongering and targeting of Muslims, gays and women through the rapid spread of dehumanizing policies and laws. This intolerance and attempt to create fear is nothing but a clever plan to get us all working against, rather than with, each other to fight the real enemy — those who are reaping obscene profits on the backs of the common man, here and around the world.

We are told that homosexuals “threaten” family values.  How?  And we hear homosexuality equated with pedophilia, though proportionally more heterosexuals are pedophiles and a danger to our children.

We have often heard that reason and emotion don’t mix.   Not true.  Only negative emotions like fear and hatred don’t mix with reason. Positive emotions like empathy and appreciation give reason the oxygen it needs to breathe.  Fear shuts down our capacity for critical thinking and yet, without that capacity to question what we have been taught to believe or what we are being told, we are easy prey to those seeking to control us.

Private vs. Public:

As far as the Boy Scouts being a private rather than a public entity … Says who?  Since when?  If they are private, why then did they receive a Congressional Charter in 1916 and why are they given taxpayer support and privileged access to federal lands … and why has every President since Howard Taft, in the year of the BSA’s founding, served as its “Honorary President”?   How can an organization that has made a point of declaring itself open to all young men for more than a hundred years now try to present itself as a private organization, entitled to discriminate at-will, even if that violates its original intent and written code?   The Supreme Court decision is nothing more than the kind of judicial activism the Right likes to rail against, except in cases like this, when our current far-right Court finds in their favor.

It seems that we have come to a place in our lives where we either belly up to the bar and scrutinize how we arrive at the conclusions we do when it comes to social, religious and political issues or we go blindly forward believing what we have been told even though it will result in great misery in our country and great wrongs committed against each other in the name of a God …  who must, by now, be disgusted with us all.

Marianne Stanley is an attorney, college professor and former journalist who believes many of our nation’s ills could be cured if our children were taught critical thinking skills beginning at the elementary level and continuing through middle and high school. She can be reached at MarianneStanley@DaytonCityPaper.com.

Marianne Stanley

The Afghanistan War is an abomination, a travesty and a testament to all that is wrong with American foreign policy today.  Woefully misnamed “Operation Enduring Freedom”, it should instead be called “Operation Enduring Misery.”   After 10 years, it has cost us more than $450 billion, left more than 1,800 young Americans dead, more than 16,000 wounded and hundreds of thousands emotionally and psychologically damaged.  Tens of thousands of our young men and women have been grievously maimed, losing their lower limbs and genitalia in increasing numbers as the fighting forces in Afghanistan and Iraq perfect IED’s, improvised explosive devices.

Gratuitously calling these once hale and hearty men and women “heroes” and awarding them a medal in no way dries the tears or repairs the forever-broken hearts and lives of their loved ones.   There is no way to tally the real human toll when that much human potential is sucked from this world forever.

This “war” is not even a war.  It is an invasion of another sovereign nation; it is an occupation of someone else’s country.  We don’t belong there.  We should not have gone there.  We have accomplished nothing except the building of more anger and hatred towards us for our inhumanity and aggression.  We are creating the very terrorists we say we are trying to eliminate.  Calling this a “War on Terror” is a lot like talking about the “War on Drugs”.   Wars are fought against a living, breathing, identifiable “enemy” who is threatening to harm us.   Terrorism is an ideology and drugs are a thing.  Neither can be “conquered”.   The Afghanistan War is no war since it can never in a million years be “won”.   No. These “wars” are smoke screens for the money lust of our military industrial complex, a term coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech in 1961.

He warned us that this day would come unless we stayed ever vigilant and enacted laws that would make this marriage of government and industry impossible.  A five-star general, Eisenhower well understood the power of an unrestrained military.  He said,  ”Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…”   The documentary, “Why We Fight” includes his powerful speech and provides a clear overview of just how and why we have arrived at this abject moment in U.S. history.

The very fact that Republicans can talk about balancing the budget, capping the deficit and cutting federal aid to social welfare programs with a straight face while unflinchingly authorizing more than $4 trillion tax dollars for Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, shows us just how downright crazy we have become as a country.

In this time of great need in America, when 44 million Americans subsist on food stamps and more than 50 million have no access to a doctor or life saving medicines, we are spending $1 million per year for each soldier in Afghanistan.  This is utter madness.  Even Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-installed Afghan leader has called the war  “ineffective, apart from causing civilian casualties.”  Do we even care about the death and destruction we wreak on innocent Afghanis?   The corporate media refuses to tell us the whole story, to show us the results of our so-called ‘War of Liberation”, to let us see the faces of the Afghanis whose homes have been violated, whose lives have been disrupted, whose peace has been denied, whose children have been killed.

The stories we are told of why we are there are blatant lies. Americans are being propagandized in the most effective way – by the telling of big lies over and over again until we all begin to believe them.  Muslims are not our enemy.  Islam is not a violent religion.  Iraq and Afghanistan  had no direct links to 9-11; the hijackers were almost all Saudi Arabians.   What has happened to America as the citadel of peace and prosperity?  Instead, we have embraced the diabolical idea of “preemptive war”, attacking countries who have done nothing to us.  We have taken on the role of an empire, intent on broadening our reach and controlling the world for our own ends.

The very idea of spreading democracy should be repugnant to every American.  We would not tolerate another nation invading us to “liberate us from democracy” so they could impose their particular form of government on us.   How arrogant of us to feel entitled to impose our system on them!   Nations can choose their own form of government and solve their own problems just as we did during our Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

The U.S. is bleeding 2 billion of dollars a week in Afghanistan.  We cannot afford this endless war against the fierce Pashtun people who are known for making their country “the Graveyard of Empires.”  Saying we are there to teach the Afghanis to fight is ludicrous; they are notorious fighters who need nothing from us except our absence from their country yet we have no plans to leave as evidenced by the permanent bases being built at Bagram, Kandahar, and Shindand.  In fact, our biggest embassy in the world is in Kabul, an $800 million fortress with 1,000 personnel that is protected by a small army of mercenaries.

Violence solves nothing.  Our old way of thinking solves nothing.   “Occupy Wall Street” is visual evidence that we are smack dab in the middle of a paradigm shift from war to peace, from “me first” to interconnectedness and from hatred to love.  And it can’t come soon enough.    It is time to together birth the new world that is struggling to be born.

Marianne Stanley is an attorney, college professor and former journalist who believes many of our nation’s ills could be cured if our children were taught critical thinking skills beginning at the elementary level and continuing through middle and high school. She can be reached at MarianneStanley@DaytonCityPaper.com.