Boy Scouts could ease city woes; leave them alone

By Rick Santorum
I commend Mayor Nutter for focusing on the violence that is keeping too many Philadelphians captive in their homes. However, the first step in addressing the horrific violence in Philadelphia is to understand that it is a symptom of a broader problem: pathologically antisocial young urban males.

That's why I just don't understand Mayor Nutter's jihad against the Boy Scouts.

Rather than get bogged down in a dispute with the Boy Scouts, the city should be supporting more organizations like this.

Over the last 50 years, cities have seen dramatic increases in murder, rape and other violent crimes along with skyrocketing run-ups in incarceration rates, substance abuse, illegitimacy, abortion, suicide, child abuse, absentee fathers and divorce, as well as related dramatic declines in graduation, literacy and employment.

It's hard for every child growing up in this environment, but by every measure boys have had a harder time succeeding than girls.

What can our civic leaders do to turn this around? What can public institutions do to help the many fatherless families with the difficult task of raising responsible young men who can change the course for their own families and our city?

Are public schools "the answer?" Thanks to the ACLU, liberal feminists and teachers unions, our government-run bureaucracy, as Christina Hoff Summers' book title says, has waged war against boys.

Liberals have largely run our great cities for the last half-century, but not many of them dare cross powerful special interests like the ACLU and the teachers unions, radical feminists or Hollywood and First Amendment absolutists (read pornographers).

Historically, the most potent forces to help families are churches and street-level civic organizations (many of them faith-based). Yet they're a problem for liberals, since most are not controlled by the government or are morally traditionalist. They often come under assault by a liberal establishment bent on imposing its own politically correct perspective on them.

Here in Philadelphia, the lethal threat to liberal orthodoxy and our young men is an organization whose aim is - don't read this aloud to small children - to teach boys to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent and (shudder) to be morally straight.

This, of course, deeply offends one of the most powerful special-interest groups of the new left, the radical gay activists. To them the Cradle of Liberty Council of the Boy Scouts, which for the record has what amounts to a don't ask, don't tell policy toward gays, is the moral equivalent of a malicious street gang that must be banished from the community.

This "gang" of 70,000 young men has been headquartered in the same building on Logan Square for 80 years - a building the scouts themselves erected, invested $1.5 million into in 1994, and spend about $60,000 annually to maintain.

But now the city would like to evict them via the back door. It wants to change their current agreement and force them to pay $200,000 in rent, a sum that city officials know the scouts cannot afford.

The reason: The scouts insist on holding true to their moral and faith-based principles that offend some powerful voices in the gay community.

The issue here isn't the scouts' legal right to stand by their foundational principles. The Supreme Court recently affirmed this right. The real issue is Philadelphia officialdom's bowing to gay special interests over the interest of the safety of the city.

In a city sometimes called "Killadelphia" whose boys need physical, educational and emotional redevelopment, who does City Hall target? The Boy Scouts. Pathetic.

These young men organize clothing drives for the homeless, pick up garbage along the Delaware River, help at soup kitchens and believe in God, country, and the betterment of their community instead of terrorizing it.

In Philadelphia, the vast majority of the young men who commit these crimes are raised without a father or a positive male role model in their lives. A positive adult male role model like a scoutmaster can make the difference between a young man becoming an absentee father himself or developing into a strong father for his own children.

Also, older scouts often mentor the younger ones and can become surrogate big brothers when there is none at home. Positive peer pressure can make the difference between a young man leading a street gang or a scout troop.

But what's really at work here is not high public policy, but old-school city politics. So let me conclude with a little political advice for His Honor.

As the senator from Pennsylvania, it was not easy to convince my colleagues to approve federal funds for a big city that wasn't known for its efficient use of tax dollars. There will be many federal and state legislators who will use the mayor's political pandering to do some pandering of their own - to the folks who see picking on the Boy Scouts as downright un-American.

Mayor Nutter, it's time to call off the dogs, before some equally political legislator treats Philadelphia as badly as you have treated the Boy Scouts.