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Banned
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Supple Cow
This is from that article linked above:
He's right. This particular newsbreak is about finding pedophilia (and not homophobia) in the ranks of the Boy Scout officials. Besides:
The fact that he was looking at the boyporn (despite the fact that the people who actually make it should be flayed and cooked on a spit) isn't evidence that he personally has ever committed any sexual crimes directly against children. As long as he pleads guilty and does his time, that's the end of the story in my book.
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ACLU = Bad -- BSA policy of exclusion of homosexual scoutmasters = Good
So many posts on this thread avoid the obvious hypocrisy of pornographer Smith, The BSA policy makers, ACLU bashers who use the ACLU v. BSA as a
hot button issue, the Christian Evangelicals who have politicized this, and of the posters here who try to persuade us of "what this isn't about" ( TFP members who volunteer their time to lead the praiseworthy boys who participate in the BSA, are explicity excluded from my focus here !).
Quote:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/national/30scout.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/national/30scout.html</a>
The director, Douglas Sovereign Smith Jr., 61, who was put on leave last month and quietly retired March 1, was expected to plead guilty on Wednesday to the single felony count filed by federal prosecutors, a crime that can carry a prison term of 5 to 20 years, said Kathy Colvin, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney's office.
Ms. Colvin said that a prosecutor's filing, rather than a grand jury indictment, was commonly used to charge a defendant when a guilty plea was anticipated. The filing <b>charges Mr. Smith with knowingly receiving and sending "computer images which contained photographs of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct."</b>
Mr. Smith, program director since 1996 and a scouting official for 39 years, did not respond to a message left on his telephone in Colleyville, near Fort Worth. His lawyer, Jack Strickland, also did not return calls but told The Associated Press: "He's not taking this well. I've got to tell you, this is a good man and I would hate to see the entirety of his life and the good things he's done defined by one incident."
Gregg Shields, a spokesman for the Boy Scouts, which has its national headquarters in Irving, a Dallas suburb, said: "We're shocked and disappointed. Never in our recollection has an employee ever been charged with anything like this."
Mr. Shields said that Mr. Smith had held an administrative post that coordinated Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts programs with churches and schools and did not involve leading troops. "He's always been a good employee," Mr. Shields said. He said there was no record of accusations against Mr. Smith.
Mr. Shields said the Scouts learned of the investigation in a visit by agents from the Department of Homeland Security in February and put Mr. Smith on administrative leave. "Shortly thereafter he chose to retire," Mr. Shields said.
Ms. Colvin said the investigation had been carried out under Operation Predator, an initiative announced in 2003 by the Department of Homeland Security "to protect children from pornographers, child prostitution rings, Internet predators, alien smugglers, human traffickers and other criminals." The operation's investigative agency is the department's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which coordinates enforcement actions from what it calls its CyberSmuggling Center in Fairfax, Va.
Court records show that the prosecutor's information was filed March 21 and that Mr. Smith surrendered on Friday, when he appeared before Judge Charles Bleil in United States District Court in Fort Worth and was released pending an arraignment on Wednesday.
Mr. Shields said he did not know the jobs Mr. Smith held in the organization before becoming national program director. He said the organization had some 7,000 employees and about 1.5 million volunteers. In November 2002, according to a Boy Scouts posting on the Web, Mr. Smith, identifying himself as "National Director of Program and Chairman, Youth Protection Task Force," sent Scouts executives a letter announcing "a groundbreaking initiative for youth protection" and expansion of "our offering of programs to protect youth."
<b>
As of February 2003, Mr. Smith said, scout leaders, parents and other volunteers could go to the Internet for a training course on protecting scouts while out on tours and trips. He expressed confidence that the Web site would prove helpful "in providing the most wholesome possible environment for young people."
When five boy scouts were among 17 young people honored with Congressional Award Gold Medals in 1999, Mr. Smith accompanied the group to Washington and posed with them for a photo in Statuary Hall.
Mr. Smith also responded on behalf of the Boy Scouts in September 2004 when a lawyer and onetime Eagle Scout, Bruce D. Collins, wrote a letter taking issue with the Boy Scouts' dismissal of an assistant scoutmaster, James Dale, because he was gay. The case reached the Supreme Court and established the Boy Scouts' right to bar gays under the organization's own First Amendment right of expressive association.
Mr. Smith replied that "some intolerant elements in our society want to force scouting to abandon its values and become fundamentally different." He said that Mr. Collins "would do well to communicate his displeasure to those directing their discriminatory assault against his beloved Boy Scouts - the A.C.L.U."</b>
Last year, Mr. Smith was honored by the Boy Scouts with a Distinguished Service Award. His nomination read in part, "His visionary support to the National OA Committee has allowed our Order to move to new levels."
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Is it a coincidence, or more BSA Executive level hypocrisy that pornagrapher Smith's "letter to the editor" on the bsalegal.org website, displays as a search result on Google, but is not available at the web address. Luckily, Smith's "ACLU as scapegoat" letter is available on Google's cache....
Quote:
<a href="http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:1NguQR9-M5YJ:www.bsalegal.org/brucecol-181.htm+would+do+well+to+communicate+his+displeasure+to+those+directing+their+discriminatory+assault+against+his+beloved+Boy+Scouts+-+the+A.C.L.U.&hl=en">http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:1NguQR9-M5YJ:www.bsalegal.org/brucecol-181.htm</a>
Corporate Legal Times
Volume 14, Number 152
Copyright 2004 Corporate Legal Times LLC
July, 2004
AN EAGLE SCOUT TAKES ISSUE WITH GROUP'S POLITICS
At the Non-Profit Bar
Bruce D. Collins
I AM an Eagle Scout. My mother was a den mother and my father a pack leader and an assistant scoutmaster. A Cub Scout at the age of 8, I was a patrol leader, senior patrol leader, junior assistant scoutmaster and summer camp assistant scoutmaster. I was selected for the Order of the Arrow and served in the National Scout Service Corps at the New York World's Fair in 1965.
I joined the Explorer Scouts and even attended a national Explorer delegate conference. Scouting gave me opportunities, taught me useful skills and imbued me with many positive values.
James Dale was a Boy Scout who had basically the same involvement in the organization as I had. The only real difference between Dale and me is that he is gay and I am not.
Dale was a 19-year-old assistant scoutmaster when the Scouts discovered he was a homosexual in 1990. They kicked him out. He sued, claiming discrimination. The case, BSA v. Dale, went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Scouts had a First Amendment right of expressive association that allowed them to choose their leaders.
Decided in 2000, the case inspired other discrimination claims, and ultimately changed the organization.
When I came across the Scouts' Web site, I had the disquieting idea that today's Boy Scouts is a fundamentally different organization from the one I was a member of 40 years ago. My first thought was, why in world does such a do-gooder organization even need such a site?
The answer came when I clicked on the "Litigation" link. Up popped a distressing number of suits (including the Dale case) brought against the Scouts and by the Scouts..............
........But now, after reading the cases and Scouting's vigorous defense of itself, it seems there has been a fundamental change. The Boy Scouts have been dragged into-or have placed themselves amid-the broad division that has infected the rest of our society.
Just as national politics have been dichotomized into blue and red states, so, too, has Scouting been set apart. As a former Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout to this day and a citizen, I am not happy about it. I can see no a good outcome on the horizon.
Bruce D. Collins is the corporate vice president and general counsel of C-SPAN. E-mail: collins@c-span.org
**************************
Corporate Legal Times
September, 2004
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR; Pg. 10
Boy Scout Pride
Dear Editor:
Bruce Collins is mistaken when he calls Boy Scouts a "fundamentally different" organization from the one he joined 40 years ago. ["An Eagle Scout Takes Issue With Group's Politics" July, p. 7]. Boy Scouts is the same organization with the same values and goals. What is fundamentally different, however, is our times.
Some intolerant elements in our society want to force scouting to abandon its values and to become fundamentally different. They want scouting to forego its constitutional rights, affirmed in 2000 by the Supreme Court in BSA v. Dale, and adopt fundamentally different values from the ones that helped shape the character of Mr. Collins and 106 million other young men over the past 94 years.
It bothers Mr. Collins that scouting is defending itself, even though he acknowledged that it has been "dragged into" the "culture war." He says the tone of our legal-issues web site, bsalegal.org, is defensive. The site does seek to defend our values and to inform the public about the three-decade-long legal assault on scouting. That we need a legal-issues web site is testament to the fact that our constitutional rights are under attack.
Clearly, Mr. Collins longs for a time when the Boy Scout organization could give its undivided attention to the "good stuff" of Scouting: "camping and life skills ..." So do we. Mr. Collins would do well to communicate his displeasure to those directing their discriminatory assault against his beloved Boy Scouts -- the ACLU.
Douglas S. Smith Jr.
National Director of Program
Boy Scouts of America
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Last edited by host; 03-30-2005 at 01:15 AM..
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