Rich: I recently read Tim Jeal’s excellent biography of Robert Baden-Powell
(title: “The Boy-Man”), founder of the Boy Scouts. Jeal shows how the Boy
Scout movement was, from its very beginnings, plagued by pederasts.
Baden-Powell’s first two appointees to the post of medical director at the
movement’s main camp, for instance, both had to be dismissed for “gross
misconduct” with the boys. Only a society as wilfully stupid and sunk in
dogma as our own could imagine that an organization for boys would NOT
attract the attention of pederasts. To insist on the “right” of homosexuals
to serve as scoutmasters is to pour gasoline on a smouldering fire. (And
before anyone e-mails in to tell me that homosexuality and pederasty are
utterly different things, not related to each other in any way, shape or
form whatsoever: I DON’T BELIEVE YOU.)