Boy Scouts, Gays, and ISKCON

Posted On: Mon, 2008-06-02 07:39 by sitapati

In an April 2005 post entitled The Inevitability of Gay Marriage I wrote: "Over the next ten years time anyone opposed to Gay marriage will increasingly be viewed like someone who opposes freedom for black people or suffrage for women."

Now in 2008 comes this story in the latest online Time magazine: the Boy Scouts are being evicted from a public building in Philadelphia for refusing to allow gays and atheists to join their organization ["The Boy Scouts' Free Speech Fight"].

Mayor Michael Nutter sums it up:

"If we were talking about an organization that discriminated against African Americans, Italians, the Irish, Catholics, people of the Jewish faith, or any of a number of other categories, there would be such an outrage that you wouldn't be able to contain it.

Now, I'm not prescribing Gay Marriage, I'm simply describing the evolution of the modern environment. Krishna-kirti prabhu [website] has also been following this development over the past few years. You might be interested to read my April 2005 post Preaching in the post-Gay-Marriage World for suggestions on preaching angles in this new environment.

Yes ISKCON, as the prophetic Krishna-kirti has been warning, your turn is coming:

If there are other groups and organizations similarly situated, we will certainly get to the bottom of it and take the appropriate action," Nutter said, "but for the moment, we're talking about the Boy Scouts... the right thing to do for the Boy Scouts is to stop discriminating against homosexuals and atheists."

Strategies to deal with this could include in the short term enforcing that only initiated ISKCON members can get married in ISKCON temples, rather than allowing uninitiated Indian congregational members to do so too. This will give us an arbitrary dividing line that doesn't involve "heterosexuals only", and prevent a militant activist in the congregation forcing the issue down the line. And, ultimately, I think we need to "allow" gay devotees to maintain their own temples where we (they? I'm confused...) can cater to that sector of the populace. We need more pure devotees amongst the gays.

It's a diverse world: you can't deny it, but you can construct (socially) to accommodate it. That's the Vedic paradigm. Vedic civilization encompasses and assimilates everything, and it has the Vaisnava brahmanas at the center - or at least our version of it does, and that's the version we're pushing.