According to Backpacker Magazine, the Ku Klux Klub, Neo-Nazis, and Aryan Nation are just part of the “fundamental tension,” that is as American as apple pie. So when a group splits from the Boy Scouts to form its own anti-LGBT hate group, the magazine feels that taking kids to the woods to preach hate is, to them, “a worthwhile endeavor.”
In 2013, The Boy Scouts of America, under pressure, decided to allow gay scouts into their ranks. They maintained their bigoted anti-gay policy of discrimination against gay scout leaders, but for some, that wasn’t enough. For some, the idea of allowing gay scouts was too much, and they split from The Boy Scouts of America, to form a totally anti-gay, anti-LBGT, “Christian” hate group called Trail Life USA.
Trail Life USA is no different that any other hate group such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Neo-Nazis, or the Christian Identity. They see homosexual, bi-sexual, and transgender individuals as people suffering from, “sexual dysfunction.” In other words, Trail Life USA sees the LGBT community at best as suffering from a “disorder,” to at worst as purveyors of sin out to destroy America.
So it was with great sadness on Wednesday when I received the latest edition of Backpacker Magazine, to read a four-page article about Trail Life USA, and how they have created a “unapologetically Christian” scouting organization. Meaning, they hate gays, and all LGBT individuals.
The article focuses on the positive side of the hate-mongering bigoted group. Here’s a sample of what author Patrick Doyle writes about a chapter of the anti-LGBT scouting group:
I chose this group because of its long history with BSA, (Boy Scouts of America) and because, with its small-town sensibility and mix of denominations, it’s not some easily caricatured group from, well, the Bible Belt. Now, I wanted to see how Troop 452 aligned with the larger mission of the national Trail Life organization, which sees itself as the cradle for the very future of Christianity in America. It wants to mold these boys into Christ-like vessels of virtue, temperance, and strength and establish them as outdoorsy, godly men of the 21st century. “My hope,” says David Servin, a Trail Life founder, “is that we will have a battalion of young men graduating from our program that will be highly talented and highly motivated and will have the skills-the manly skills-that are necessary to go and take back our culture.”
The idea that a magazine would feature a hate group such as this, as merely an alternative to scouting, is preposterous. And anti-gay bigots, like Rachel Zurer, the content editor at Backpacker magazine should be ashamed of themselves.
Take the last line alone: "young men graduating from our program that will be highly talented and highly motivated and will have the skills-the manly skills-that are necessary to go and take back our culture.” This is nothing more than the race-baiting that took place in decade’s past. We must destroy the gays to “take back our culture.”
Neither Doyle, Zurer, or anybody at Backpacker Magazine took offense at all to the promotion of a cultural war with a goal of discriminating against, bullying, and even eliminating gays.
Doyle writes of homophobia as a “small-town virtue,” and that because both anti-LGBT Catholics and protestant bigots are in the same hate-group, it is somehow a “mix of denominations.”
The writer of the article also quotes a Trail Life Leader, and anti-gay bigot saying:
People have all kind of sexual dysfunction. We hope they would work through that.
Neither the author, nor bigoted content editor Rachel Zurer takes issue with this statement. Nowhere is there a disclaimer stating that Backpacker Magazine opposes the discrimination of people based on sexual preference or gender identity. They are perfectly content with the idea that LGBT individuals suffer from “sexual dysfunction.”
Nowhere does the article compare Trail Life’s discriminatory and hateful practices to those groups that discriminate against women, blacks, Jews, Catholics. Latinos, and a list of others. Backpacker Magazine could have published an article about efforts by the Ku Klux Klan to take little white boys to the woods and teach them to hate black people, and it would be the same article.
The author takes great pains to portray the hate-group in the nicest terms possible. Painting a picture of caring adults who just want to teach kids (straight boys) scouting skills. In the article’s heading, the question is asked, “Is there a right way to get kids outdoors?” Yes there is a right way to get kids outdoors, and it’s not using the outdoors to preach hate and intolerance of LGBTs.
But Backpacker Magazine doesn’t see it that way. They soft-peddle the group’s message of hate and division saying:
Everyone, it seems, can agree that introducing boys to wilderness and outdoor skills is a worthwhile endeavor.
I disagree, a Neo-Nazi group introducing boys to the wilderness and teaching hatred of Jews is not a “worthwhile endeavor.” A white supremacist teaching the hatred of African-Americans in the woods is not a “worthwhile endeavor.”
And neither is using the outdoors to perpetrate an agenda that leads to discrimination and hatred of LGBTs
The article ends with the bigoted idea that we can all just “agree to disagree.” The bigot writer sums it all up, not as the anti-LGBT bigotry it is, but just good ‘ol Americans disagreeing:
If there’s one idea we can all agree on, it’s this: Americans get to disagree with each other on how they want to live and what they want to believe. It’s a fundamental tension that unfolds everywhere from schoolyards to the Supreme Court.
Should the outdoors be any different?
I’m sure to a bigots like Patrick Doyle, and Rachel Zurer, no, the woods should be any different, we should hate gays there, just like everywhere else.
But here’s another idea that I think pretty American: equal protection under the law. Just because you disagree with somebody’s “lifestyle,” doesn’t mean you can discriminate against them and treat them as second-class citizens. That’s my America.
