I am an Eagle Scout, but I wasn’t always sure if I was supposed to be one. As soon as I was old enough to think critically about what I did with my Thursday evenings, I began to question whether I wanted to represent an organization that has very clear and rigid ideas about what it means to be a boy and, by extension, a man.
And so last year, when the Boy Scouts of America yet again refused to amend its policy to allow openly gay scouts and leaders to participate in the program, I contemplated sending back my medal as a grandiose gesture of disapproval. Why should I benefit from the title my straightness had allowed me to earn when so many young boys and men could not?
But last week’s decision to allow openly gay scouts to be BSA members made me glad to have held on to the distinction.
Let me digress for a second. As a straight, able-bodied and middle-class white male with a tendency to overuse the word “privilege,” I have often been accused of indulging in “white guilt.” But I’ve never felt that was the right term.
Though many straight, white males have committed abominable acts, I do not feel personally guilty for those acts — just as being an Eagle Scout should not mean I bear personal responsibility for the prejudice of the organization associated with that title. But it should mean, in both cases, that I acknowledge and use that privilege to help extend to others the opportunities that have been so fortuitously extended to me.
I realized that this recent progress — significant, though not terminal — had been brought about in large part not by guilt, but by leaders and scouts who chose to remain involved with the program despite their problems with it.
They believed that Scouting, in its ideal form, could be a stabilizing and wonderful influence in the lives of young people, just as it was for me. Instead of succumbing to the Scouting equivalent of “white guilt,” they decided that more good could be achieved by redefining what it meant to be a Boy Scout than by leaving the program in the hands of those who would continue its history of prejudice.
When a young man receives his Eagle Scout award, part of the oath he takes goes like this: “On my honor, I will do my best to make my training an example, my rank and my influence count strongly … for better citizenship in my troop, and in my church, and in my community, and in my contacts with other people.”
In all situations, casting our rank, influence and privilege aside rather than wielding them as a force for change would be to cast aside valuable weapons in the fight for equality in Scouting and elsewhere.
