I just finished watching tonight's episode of "Bullshit" on the Boy Scouts, while Penn and Teller did a good job explaining the overall discriminatory policy, they left out my brother and I.
The one major problem that I have with the approach that the producers took was the heavy focus on gays in scouting and not Atheists (non-believers). The whole camping trip experiment to me seemed a little like a time-filler instead of an explainer. But the info on Hans Zeiger was just a hoot, that guy really does live in a reality distortion field.
Some of the facts on Scouting and it's alignment with the Mormon Church also brought up some interesting facts. 60% of all troops have a religious affiliation and 30,000 troops (could be scouts, I'll have to double check) belong to the Mormon Church. Penn's letter writing campaign to get the Atheist "Son" of a stay-at-home mom and a Homeland Security Father was also a great explainer on how not everyone in Scouting is inclined to follow the discriminatory policies of the organization. But what they failed to mention was that even if a troop that isn't affiliated with a Church allows in a member who is Atheist/Agnostic/Non-believer or gay the troop is at risk of losing their charter from the National office (Which has happened).
Penn Juliette in Scout Shorts was just the scariest picture to enter my brain. No amount of starring at something that starts with a P and ends with an N will erase that from my mind.
It was nice seeing Margret Downey and Steven Cozza well represented in the show. Both had cases with the Boy Scouts and I still keep in contact with Margret on occasion.
As the saying goes "the proof is in the pudding" and in this case it's a 13% decline in enrollment. While I hate to see Scouting suffer from the loss of leaders (and this could also be the fact that Scouting seems detached from the MySpace, IM, E-mail, Text society that so many of today's youth live in) this also shows that the discriminatory policy of Scouting is taking it's toll on the organization.
One more thing, when you decline to defend your position on camera the term is "Respectfully Decline" not "Respectively Decline."
