COLUMN: Scouts' guide gets modern look

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99Were you ever lost?" someone once asked Daniel Boone. "No," he replied, "but once I was confused for about five days over where I was." Twenty years ago this spring, Paul Fussell, an emeritus professor of English at Penn, published an essay in The New Republic called simply "The Boy Scout Handbook." Amid the pervasive cynicism of the post-Watergate era, Fussell praised the Handbook for being "devoted to associating happiness and virtue? For all its focus on Axmanship, Backpacking, Cooking, First Aid, Flowers, Hiking, Map and Compass, Semaphore, Trees and Weather, [it] is a book about goodness. No home, and certainly no government office, should be without a copy." Two decades and many political scandals later, Fussell's argument remains salient. But the image of scouting is not as innocent as it once was. The virtues of scouting that Fussell praised -- civic duty, religious faith, conservation, physical and mental fitness and just plain common sense -- risk being overshadowed by the Boy Scouts' unfortunate association with the culture wars. The politicization of the Scouts is not altogether the fault of the Boy Scouts of America. The organization has been dedicated to faith in God, teetotaling, abstinence before marriage and the primacy of the heterosexual union since its founding in 1910 as an offshoot of a similar British program. But values that were uncontroversial in 1979 are powder kegs in today's America -- a nation so wracked by the culture wars that it devoted months to a presidential impeachment trial over the definition and importance of personal integrity. The BSA has recently come under criticism, some of it deserved, for it's policy prohibiting open homosexuals from its ranks. And this being the 1990s, the BSA's critics are not just yelling but suing: The New Jersey Supreme Court will soon decide whether to uphold a judgment allowing a disbarred homosexual scout to return to the organization. Into this charged environment comes the latest edition of the Handbook. Published several months ago -- with a first-print run of 750,000 to add to the 34 million already in print -- the 11th edition gives the tradition-loving Scouts a modern face. It is inclusive rather than Anglophilic, suggestive rather than scolding. In many respects, the Handbook makes the BSA appear as politically correct as today's hyper-regulated workplace. It pictures almost as many black scouts as white scouts, touts a merit-badge in "disability awareness" and liberally interprets the Pledge of Allegiance's "one nation under God" phrase to mean freedom not just to worship a God of one's choosing, but freedom "to believe in God." Gone is the patronizing section devoted to American Indian culture and camping techniques. Added is a section noting the varied religious backgrounds of Scouts -- including Catholocism, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. The sections on outdoorsmanship emphasize teamwork over survival skills -- a tactful change in tone in a decade notable for its survivalist militias, millenial cults and pro-life vigilantes. The new edition imparts values without appearing to crusade. Even the sections advocating teetotaling and pre-marital abstinence are wrapped in sensible chapters about physical health and sexual development. ("It is important to remember that sex is never the most grown-up part of a relationship," it wisely cautions.) The Handbook does not mention homosexuality, though it does have a pull-out pamphlet titled "How to Protect Your Children from Child Abuse." It even advocates holding a "family meeting" to make children aware of the danger of molestation. As for the BSA's exclusion of gays, it adheres to a "don't ask-don't tell" policy. "A person who doesn't make [their homosexuality] known, we have no knowledge of. We don't perform investigations on people's sexuality," a BSA spokesperson told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in March. "We don't make interpretations of moral values," another scout official told the paper. "But we want role models who reflect traditional family values and [homosexuality] is not in it." The BSA's prohibition is archaic and offensive, and it is probably more trouble than it's worth. Still, there's no reason the organization can't set its own requirements for membership. It would be a shame if gender politics allowed the government to regulate an institution that has thrived on independence. Unlike continental Europe, which has a history of government-controlled youth organizations whose service was only to the state, the United States has been lucky enough to develop a civil society for which patriotism was an outgrowth of service, not its reason for being.