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The District meeting this evening included an envoy from the Executive Selection Committee who requested we provide information on features we’re looking for in a new executive.  Someone suggested “having an open door policy”.  I found this quaint as I consider it far more important to get an appointment than to be able to barge into someone’s office, but I pressed the point and wanted transparency in that meeting minutes and documents should default to public.  The guests did not agree.

Me: Every set of meeting minutes and agendas should be available on the web page.
Guest: We will be making them available on request.
Me: Why?  Just publish them.
Guest: There are some people who shouldn’t have access to them.
Me: What are we doing that we need to hide?  We are the Boy Scouts of America.  Our victories and failures should be public.  Who are these enemies?
Guest: Some people don’t have our best interests in mind.
Me: If you can’t name a single person, then it’s a canard.  I’m not going to accept “If we release our minutes, the terrorists will have won” as an argument in America’s premier youth values-based program.

A few people clapped or laughed and the guest changed the topic quickly.  As I’m leaving Scouting, I’ve become much more outspoken as to its weaknesses.  When I return, I should quit six months later for a few days and see if I can keep the iconoclasm going.

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Today’s Cit World involved reviewing the basic rights of different nations and noting which were similar and which were different.  I posed the question “can anyone think of an exception to America’s granting of freedom of speech?”  Normally I hear something about libelous or defamatory speech, calls to violence or the old standby of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.  Instead, some little kid raised his paw and said “teachers aren’t allowed to teach the truth of intelligent design”.  In the past, when kids innocently said something like this, I’d rhetorically tear them a new asshole; this happened with regularity when I was in ecology and someone contested climate science and the occasional “medical secrets they don’t want you to know”.  Here, I simply replied “Can you think of a better example”, he shrugged his shoulders and we moved on.

I was very proud of my powers of self-restraint and thought myself slowly becoming an adult when I dismissed the session and hadn’t decapitated anyone.  Shortly thereafter one Scout and one staff member approached me saying “wow, Terry, I really thought you were going to hand it to that free speech kid”.

:-(