Boiled Frog in Clock Frame Sauce

On Monday of last week the front page of the local paper carried an article that the local Boy Scouts have “declined” to receive any further funding from the United Way. The United Way had already been steadily dropping funding from a high of over $300K a few years back, to what they offered this year, which was $31K. Given the amount of paperwork that United Way was requiring, it was going to cost the scouts about as much to do the paperwork as they were getting, so they gave the agency what they wanted and parted ways.

I spent this weekend up at Camp Ripley in North Central MN at the annual “Ripley Rendezvous” where around a thousand Scouts from around the state descend on the local Guard Camp to do the usual “Scout things” … ropes, guns, knives, archery, merit badges of all sorts, dress in uniforms, follow rules”, and learn little bits about honor, trust, reverence, bravery, and all sorts of other radical concepts.

The Bork book continues to be my main read, and the events of the week bring at least one element of the liberal agenda into stark focus. Bork points out that the liberal technique is to always take a new item on their agenda and make it a “right”. Once it is a “right”, anyone that questions it is on the defensive. What has turned the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) from being an organization accepted by nearly all Americans as being a huge positive influence in the lives of young men, into a pariah group that is no longer worthy of funding from United Way is the issue of “Gay rights”. Just the mere mention of the topic as a “right” shows the magic of the liberal phrasing.

We Americans love “rights”, so when some group is questioning the “rights” of other groups, we tend to side with the folks who are having their “rights” challenged. It doesn’t take a lot of thought before realizing that we are the victims of careful framing. The BSA is questioning if gay men are the right choice to put in leadership positions over boys aged 11-17. The Catholic Church failed to question this issue adequately, and the results have been fairly evident.

I suspect that the gay issue is actually just a convenient issue for liberals to use against the Scouts. There is a lot in the Scout program for a liberal to hate. While they are non-denominational, they do recognize a God. A combination of God, guns, the flag, uniforms, and a “code of conduct” is pretty much enough to send a good Blue State Liberal gagging for the exits. An NPR program that heard a while back counseled that it would be “immoral to buy popcorn from a neighborhood Scout.” The right thing to do was to confront the parents about the error of allowing their boy to take part in an organization that denied “basic rights”.

One of my earliest posts was on the book “Don’t Think of an Elephant”, which points out how supposedly Republicans have discovered “framing”. We live in a country where an organization that has been in place for over 100 years and seen as being moderate in the extreme has in less than 10 years been demonized so that it is now “radical”, and “immoral”. All the while, the conservatives are the ones that are classified as taking part in “culture wars”, and “trying to roll the clock back”.

We have been “framed”, but it isn’t by the right. The push for social change is from the left, but they are framing their arguments in such a way that when combined with the power of the media it SEEMS that positions held forever … Marriage being between a man and a woman, sending your sons out on camping trips with gay men being a bad idea … THOSE are the positions that are “radical”. “The clock” has NEVER pointed to same sex marriage nor a “right” for gays to be Scoutmasters!

We are frogs boiling in a framed pot, we better wake up and do some clock control.