Boy Scouts Covered Up For Child Molesters
The Boy Scouts, an organization that has long made the controversial decision to bar homosexual scout leaders lest they be a risk to the kids, covered up incidents of molestation for decades.
From the LA Times:
Over two decades, the Boy Scouts of America failed to report hundreds of alleged child molesters to police and often hid the allegations from parents and the public.
A Los Angeles Times review of 1,600 confidential files dating from 1970 to 1991 has found that Scouting officials frequently urged admitted offenders to quietly resign — and helped many cover their tracks.
Volunteers and employees suspected of abuse were allowed to leave citing bogus reasons such as business demands, “chronic brain dysfunction” and duties at a Shakespeare festival.
The details are contained in the organization’s confidential “perversion files,” a blacklist of alleged molesters, that the Scouts have used internally since 1919. Scouts’ lawyers around the country have been fighting in court to keep the files from public view.
As The Times reported in August, the blacklist often didn’t work: Men expelled for alleged abuses slipped back into the program, only to be accused of molesting again. Now, a more extensive review has shown that Scouts sometimes abetted molesters by keeping allegations under wraps.
There’s really no way to defend this. Even if you could argue that the Scouts were at least getting the offenders away from the kids (and that doesn’t seem to be the case given that many of the molesters got right back in the organization), but not reporting the crimes to the police they left these monsters in the public and on the prowl for more victims.
Which shows that the bigger threat to the safety of the scouts wasn’t homosexual troop leaders but rather the leadership of Boyscouts of America itself.
What a tragic thing, as the BSA is a good organization.