More WorldNutDaily Nonsense on the Boy Scouts

Joseph Farah has already won an Idiot of the Month Award (now called the Robert O'Brien Trophy) for his hypocritical and absurd arguments about the Boy Scouts and the ACLU. Now Hans Zeiger, intrepid Hillsdale College student and So-Con columnist-in-training (you can find his columns on about a half a dozen webpages that I've fisked in the past) seems to be bucking for his own award with this article in the WorldNutDaily. While Farah was up in arms over the decision by the Pentagon not to allow military bases to sponsor Scout troops, Zeiger is frothing at the mouth over a school district's decision not to let the Scouts come in and recruit members in public school classrooms during the school day. And boy is he in full cry over it:

But it is this ongoing campaign to get the Boy Scouts out of the public square that is not only discriminatory against a fine youth organization, it also does grave harm to the very foundations of the American way of life.

Balderdash. What is going on here is that the defenders of righteousness want to have it both ways. In the lawsuit against the Boy Scouts for discriminating against atheists and homosexuals, they argued that the Boy Scouts are a private organization and therefore they may determine the membership requirements of their own organization. That argument was absolutely correct, and I said so at the time. I feel the same way about the little uproar over the Augusta National golf club, host of the Masters, not allowing women to join. Fine by me. It's a private club, they can decide who they want to let in without any outside interference. Keep out guys named Bob if you want, or people with red hair. I don't care, it's private. The Supreme Court agreed as well and ruled in the Scouts' favor on the basis of them being a private organization.

But there's another side to that coin. Being a private organization, that means they have no claim to government funds or support. It means they're on equal footing with any other private organization. Do schools allow other private groups to come into classrooms during class time and recruit? None that I know of. Would they allow a private organization like, say, American Atheists come in and recruit new members? Of course they wouldn't. Yet they want this private organization, which discriminates against the non-religious and against gays, to be given exclusive access to the classrooms. Sorry guys, you can't have it both ways. If it's a private organization, then they have no claim on government funds or support and it is not "discrimination", as Zeiger absurdly claims, not to allow them to recruit in public school classrooms. And then there's this bizarre passage:

Self-government is the basis of constitutional government. If we don't watch out, if we don't protect the Boy Scouts from further attacks, we will lose our ability to perpetuate self-government.

Uh, how exactly does the decision of a school district not to allow the Boy Scouts to recruit during school hours hurt self-government? If they decided to exclude private atheist organizations from recruiting during school time, would that somehow hurt self-government too? Of course not. Because it's different. Except, of course, it isn't different - it's precisely the same. It's two private groups, both of whom are not allowed to recruit in schools, along with other private groups. See, they want it both ways. They want it to be private for purposes of avoiding the discrimination laws, but they still want the government to endorse it, give it special priveleges and financial support. But if you do that, then the discrimination laws apply. It's a catch-22 that is easily resolved with a little intellectual consistency, something the So-Cons seem a bit short on.