The simple fact is that “we, as a society” do offer parenting classes.

Also, if you belong to a good church or a synagogue, they and the people who are also members should be helping you with teh parenting.

It can be done without the state. It is done without the state; and much better than the state does it.

The Boy Scouts can have whatever rules they want. If you don’t like it, lobby them, form your own scout troop and put them out of business, etc. Do NOT try to force them to change via government power.

Which is exactly his argument if you bothered to read it.

…anyone who, like B. Daniel, claims to be libertarian should support the BSA keeping it’s gay ban…

Wrong. A conservative and/or libertartian viewpoint would be to not make the government force the BSA, but to allow the BSA to choose for themselves whether to allow gay people. If you can’t understand that difference, please re-read it. Dan is arguing that the government should not force them to do so, that they should continue to have the right of free association, but that they should choose to allow gay scouts and leaders.

And they should. Because there is no reason a gay scout cannot be “morally straight”, and really the Scouts should welcome the opportunity to have a positive influence on the future of even the gay community. That’s being conservative first and gay second…or third or fourth or somewhere farther down the list.

We can’t always know what someone else’s motive was for committing a horrible act. We can enable other people to keep such an act from being committed against them.

New York City deserves the Darwin Award — the whole city — for stupidity so heinous it makes me wonder if evolution really does continue to move the human race forward.

Punishing people for acting on their beliefs: That is the leftie wet dream…

And the right-wing wet dream is just to be left the Hell alone.

Look at someone like Randy Weaver, a person who held appallingly racist beliefs. But all he wanted to do was live apart from society in a remote part of Idaho. For that, the Feds shot his wife, his dog, and his 14 year old son.

Compare him, though, to someone like Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, or Barack Obama; fascists who aren’t content to go and live quietly according to their beliefs, but believe they are so right and everyone else is so wrong that they should use the power of the state to crush anyone who doesn’t believe as they do.

[VS] The fact is we, as a society, don’t. We don’t offer any kind of parenting classes.

[VtK] I don’t use “we” as a synonym for “centrally planned, authoritarian state.”

V, that’s an insightful riposte. The simple fact is that “we, as a society” do offer parenting classes. I see them advertised sometimes. And I know that courts sometimes order people into them.

So how could VS think that “we, as a society” don’t offer them? Only if VS is referring to the fact that our government doesn’t subsidize/mandate them universally. In other words, only if VS has a mind which equates ‘society’ with whatever he can see *the government* doing.

As to whether all violent crime is hate crime: I’m with MSM on this one. No human being can work themselves into the state actually needed to pull the trigger, plunge the knife, batter the woman, etc. unless they hate on some level. The violent crime itself is prima facie evidence of hate.

Criminals may not hate their particular victim – but they hate society, or the victim’s perceived group, or something. Show me a rapist and I’ll show you a man who, deep down, hates women. Show me an armed robber who was hoping he wouldn’t have to kill anyone, and I’ll show you a man who was planning to kill people (if they got in his way) before he began the robbery.

Even the police (or others who defend us) hate on some level; that is, they hate criminals/crime. And they need to (so I’m not knocking them; it’s a problem only when they let it get out of control).

In addition to which, where is the empirical and/or anecdotal evidence that the presence of enhanced penalties for the commission of “hate crimes” has prevented any of the acts for which it was written?

They have a nearly-unique Federal Charter—which I think only the American Red Cross being the other—and the President of the United States it’s their titular president. And that Federal Charter in-part is why they traditionally had access to so-many US Military facilities, equipment and Army/ Natl. Guard support. Scouting was seen at the Federal-level as integral to the National Defense and civil defense efforts for decades and enjoyed auxiliary status as-such.

Up until after Vietnam, the Military opinion was that Scouting benefitted military preparedness and civil defense. Having Boy Scouts trained in First Aid, woodcraft and field craft saved the Army several weeks of valuable Basic Training in case of war, and most Boy Scouts were taught how to use a rifle in the old-days courtesy of free surplus ammunition from the Army and the Corps. And Scouts have always played a role in natural disaster preparedness and recovery.

Most of this was lost in the last two or three decades when the Urban Liberals, and then the Evangelical Fundamentalists took-over the Scouting Movement’s national leadership when they moved BSA HQ to Texas from New Jersey.

When I was in Scouting in the 60s thru 80s, several of our active leaders I suspected were gay…and I know several of the professional leaders at the District level were. And they would have killed and left a child-predator’s entails hanging from a tree if they harmed a boy. Back then Scouting was the “safe place” away from the bullies and a judging-society—in the company or boys and men who cared for and about you and your development. You learned to be an individual and a team-player. To be confident in the woods, to not be afraid of being alone in the Dark, to make your won decisions and live with the consequences, to save lives, to make fires and shelter, to serve the community.

Then Natl. Policy and the Handbook changed and suddenly “adults” became the enemy. Fending off bears looking for food became “fending off the Scoutmaster. Life-saving first-aid became drug awareness education, and they stopped going into the Woods.

Time to go back to Theodore Roosevelt, Dan Beard and Sir Robert Baden-Powell and start all over again.

Hate crime laws…punish perps…not only for the act, but acting upon their beliefs.

Punishing people for acting on their beliefs: That is the leftie wet dream…as we see today, in Obama’s IRS scandal.

I would rather just punish people for their acts – those of their acts which are objectively bad – and leave it at that.

Not to mention, I strongly doubt shouting “Jesus Loves You” was a thing 800 years ago.

And not to mention, a great part of why the Crusades happened was because of hundreds of years – *hundreds of years*, at that time already – of religiously-motivated Muslim invasion, butchery, and piracy inflicted on Europe. Europeans felt it was necessary for them to finally go on the offense, if they were to have any peace from it at home. Expressing it through their own religious institutions was the style/culture of the time, and no worse than what the Muslims had been about for centuries.

Lefties like to leave those parts out.

I am of two minds. I agree with SA about the BSA being the latest victim of attacking freedom of association and the Left’s totalitarianism and lust for cultural conquest. On that ground, no gays.

But if women have been involved in this org for the last 40 years as scoutmasters, etc. what’s to lose? It’s already been feminized and made generic. So who cares?

VTK > do you have examples of innocent people?

Hmmm…where to begin???

RE: comment 88

Whether or not the BSA allows openly gay members should be left up to the BSA, but I think anyone who, like B. Daniel, claims to be libertarian should support the BSA keeping it’s gay ban as a way of supporting freedom of association and opposing the Left’s totalitarianism and lust for cultural conquest. But B. Daniel, like most gay conservatives here, is gay first, conservative/libertarian second, and he supports the Left’s position on gay issues–and most other social/sexual issues–because his sexuality is fundamental to his worldview. He just won’t admit it.