Another step toward totalitarianism…in the name of “liberty” in the City of Brotherly Love

Yesterday’s The New York Times [HERE] published an article entitled “Boy Scouts Lose Philadelphia Lease in Gay-Rights Fight.” In the 1920s the City of Philadelphia allowed the Scouts to build a building on a small plot of municipal land in the Center City charging the Scouts a nominal $1 per year for rent. As I understand the situation, the City did nothing to build the structure, it merely provided the land. However, over the last several years, gay-rights advocacy groups have pressured the City of Philadelphia to pressure the Scouts to change their membership regulations to embrace gay members. As MOJ readers will recall, the Supreme Court decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale held that the Scouts did not have to changer their membership regulations. The Court noted that forced membership is unconstitutional if the person seeking membership, in this case a gay scout, would affect in a significant way the organization’s ability to advocate public or private viewpoints. The viewpoint in contention in this Philadelphia case is, to quote Stacey Sobel, executive director of Equality Advocates Pennsylvania, a gay-rights advocacy group, is to send a message that the city disapproves of their views. As this person was quoted, “We are not looking to kick the Boy Scouts out. We just want them to play be the same rules as everyone else in the city.” And the same rules means for Equality Advocates Pennsylvania that the Scouts must change their membership policies which the Supreme Court of the United States has declared are constitutionally protected. So much for the Constitution and the liberties it protects.

It is odd to me, and perhaps others, that Equality Advocates Pennsylvania would most likely support the liberties found by the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Court relies on the famous mystery passage of Planned Parenthood v. Casey— there is “a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter… At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” But Equality Advocates Pennsylvania do not wish the Boy Scouts to exercise their constitutionally protected liberties as long as they conflict with the objectives of this gay-rights organization. Equality Advocates Pennsylvania have a powerful ally amongst some members of the Philadelphia City Council who, in ex post fashion, have used the authority of the state to pressure the Scouts to abandon their beliefs and their liberties.

It would seem that the liberty demanded by some is not to be extended to the Scouts. But Equality Advocates Pennsylvania insists that they do not want “to kick the Boy Scouts out.” They just want the Boy Scouts to believe, or at least accept the beliefs that they hold. The method to be used is this: put economic pressure on the Scouts by threatening to take away the land on which their building rests. King Henry VIII used a similar tactic in pressuring Church institutions to accept his views on marriage. Those who did not subscribe to his views lost their property and were put out on the street. For the King, the views that differed from his were “a canker in the body politic, and he would have it out.”

In both of these instances, we see an exercise of totalitarianism. The totalitarianism of today, like its predecessors in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, is a type of dictatorship that relies and insists on a centralized, universal control of all or many aspects of life including innermost convictions. The totalitarian state can conjure up means of ensuring public endorsement of its control demanding uniform support by all over whom it exercises dominion. This is what the Philadelphia City Council is doing to the Scouts. The threat of eviction of the Scouts is designed to guarantee cohesion within society and is an important component of the totalitarian state. Nonetheless, in spite of these efforts at universal, central control, there often remain elements of the society, such as the Scouts, that preserve a moral force and function as a counterpoint to the pressure of the state. But by pursuing their goals, the Scouts face a kind of persecution and annihilation when targeted by the state’s enforcement mechanism.

Christopher Dawson spent a career studying conscience, religious belief and faith, and public life noted that in more modern times Christianity needed to become an underground movement. He recognized that not only the totalitarian state but even the modern “democratic” state “is not satisfied with passive obedience; it demands full co-operation from the cradle to the grave.” This obedience can be essential if anyone or any group is to avoid being “pushed… out of physical existence.” In the context of the Boy Scout case in Philadelphia, Dawson’s words from the first half of the twentieth century may be an accurate prophecy for the world of the early twenty-first century.

The views and beliefs that are targeted today need not be held by a few isolated individuals since they can and likely are held by many other persons. In this context, the hallmark of the totalitarian regime is its plan to eradicate beliefs and acts that may be held by many individuals and are often considered mainstream. Surely this is the case in Philadelphia. These are not only interesting times, they are challenging as well. And how should these challenges be met? With resignation? With defiance? Or, with the reasoned arguments previously advanced by the Scouts of their constitutionally protected belief? I think it is the latter. And, when people of good will understand what is afoot, I pray that the Scouts will receive the support of many public officials and citizenry alike. If the liberty of Mr. Lawrence is to be protected, so must that of the Boy Scouts of America—and, for that matter, everyone else.    RJA sj