The Washington Post this week stepped delicately around the thuggish tactics employed by Philadelphia City Solicitor Romulo Diaz, who has engineered a coup against the Cradle of Liberty Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
In the November 19 article, “Philadelphia Gives Boy Scouts Ultimatum,” Post staff writer Dafna Linzer noted that Diaz had given the Boy Scouts until December 3 to agree to pay $200,000 or lose the headquarters the Scouts have had in a city park for nearly 100 years.
The local Scouts, who serve 64,000 mostly minority boys in Philadelphia and in two adjoining counties, had an agreement to lease the building for a dollar a year. Urged on by Diaz, the City Council on May 31 invoked a “sexual orientation” law and reneged on the agreement.
Here’s how the Post summarized the city’s crackdown: “The confrontation between the city and the nation’s third largest Scouts chapter has been building for four years, with each side blaming the other for backing out of previous agreements and for escalating tensions.”
So who’s the bully? Egged on by local homosexual activists, city officials are clearly the aggressors, not the Scouts. But the Post’s description is a classic example of moral equivalence, in which aggressor and victim are co-belligerents.
The Post also noted that the city “has invited the Boy Scouts to remain in the nearly 100-year-old building as paying tenants.”
“Invited?” That’s a little like saying a mugger “has invited” his victim to remain unharmed as long as he forks over his wallet.
Here are a few things the Post story left out:
· The architect of the harassment against the Scouts, City Solicitor Diaz, is openly homosexual, as has been reported in the Philadelphia press.
· The Scouts built the building with their own money, and then gave it to the city in 1928.
· The Scouts had a lease “in perpetuity” with the city, an agreement the City Council broke.
· The Scouts bar openly homosexual Scoutmasters and members for moral reasons and for the sake of protecting young boys from possible harm, not because they are motivated by bigotry or prejudice. The Post article read as if the Scouts have no rational reason for wanting to determine whether prospective leaders or members are attracted sexually to males.