The Christian conservative Family
Research Council (FRC) has come to the defense of the Boy Scouts of
America's policy banning openly gay scouts and leaders.
Responding to the news that the UPS
Foundation has added sexual orientation and gender identity to its
anti-discrimination policy, thus ending its charitable donations to
the Boy Scouts, FRC charged that the Scouts have been made “the
target of harassment, ridicule and now financial bullying.”
(Related: UPS,
Intel end funding Boy Scouts of America over gay ban.)
“What UPS and other corporations
refuse to acknowledge is that the Scouts' policy isn't a matter of
intolerance – but security,” FRC
wrote in a blog post. “After hundreds of cases of child sex
abuse plagued the organization, the BSA tried to create a membership
criteria in the best interest of kids' safety and parents' rights.
Over the years, the Boy Scouts have paid millions – possibly
hundreds of millions – to boys victimized by same-sex predators.
And the financial toll was nothing compared to the emotional trauma
of these children, whose lives are forever scarred by those
encounters. For more than 100 years, the Scouts have focused on
instilling character and leadership into America's boys. They aren't
about to compromise that mission just to placate liberal companies
and activists.”
Zack Ford at ThinkProgress.com
criticized the group, noting that “most pedophiles identify as
heterosexuals.”
“It is by drawing fraudulent
connections between homosexuality and pedophilia that FRC earns its
designation as a 'hate group,'” Ford added, a reference to the
Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) 2010 addition of FRC to the same
list of hate groups as the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam and
Aryan Nations for its opposition to gay rights.