News Release
For Immediate Release: February 18, 2020
Contact: Diane Gramley 1.814.271.9078
As Predicted Boy Scouts of America Files for Bankruptcy
(Harrisburg) – It seems the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have had a pedophile problem for decades, as revealed in the release of its “Perversion Files” in recent years, but that did not prevent them from succumbing to pressure to begin allowing boys who identify as homosexual to be scouts. That May 2013 decision was followed two years later by allowing open homosexuals to be Scout leaders and then in 2017 the BSA began allowing those who identify as transgender. Those decisions have led to this day’s filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA), a statewide child advocacy group, and others warned the Boy Scouts of the dangers in these changes in policy.
“The Boy Scouts, once a great American institution, is no longer. The decisions it has made in the last several years have been devastating. Those decisions have led to families fleeing the organization in large numbers; it has led to them allowing girls into the ranks. All this has forced them to mortgage the “crown jewel” of Scouting – the Philmont Scout Ranch in Colfax County, New Mexico– and now this Chapter 11 filing. Allowing those who identify as homosexual and transgender were some of the decisions that felled this once mighty organization,” noted Diane Gramley, president of the AFA of PA.
Obviously the BSA listened to the wrong advisors: Robert Gates, Boy Scouts of America president and a former CIA director and U.S. Defense secretary, under the first Bush and then Obama administrations, urged the organization to accept political shifts and make the change at its national meeting in May 2014 saying, “I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement.” It should also be noted that during his tenure as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, he advocated for the repeal of the President Clinton “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.
“We are saddened by the situation the BSA finds themselves in, but they were warned repeatedly not to listen to those pushing for the opening of their ranks to boys and leaders who identify as homosexual and then to opening their ranks to transgenders. The Boy Scouts already had a problem with pedophilia that they refused to adequately address, but they still wouldn’t listen! It is a sad day, but it should be a wakeup notice to all to take the protection of children seriously,” Gramley concluded.
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