... Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Rational

I've written before that the focus among non-Boy Scouts, the Scout leadership, and a few newsmaking troops on anti-gay and anti-atheist bigotry doesn't match my experience of how my (not especially unusual or liberal) troop actually ran in practice. As a data point, it occurred to me the other day that the first atheists I ever met were a pair of brothers who were in Boy Scouts with me. They didn't keep their faithlessness in the closet, nor did they appear to experience any outright discrimination (though it was hardly a secular paradise, and they did have to sit through the occasional non-proselytizing religious observance). So it seems to me that Scouting could so easily be made fully accepting of gays and atheists without significantly altering its program that the defenders of the current policy have completely lost sight of what's worthwhile in the organization.