Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9403180042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Elizabeth Strother
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Mark is the 11-year-old agnostic rejected by the Scouts who was in the news last week because the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. Lower courts had ruled that the Scouts aren't covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, barring places of public accommodation from discriminating against people because of their race or religion - or lack of the latter.
The justices refused the case without comment, so it's anyone's guess as to their thinking on the Scouts' policy. But surely its decision is good news for folks who fear this country's cherished freedom of religion is being supplanted by freedom from religion.
And, while I understand and agree with the principle that teachers should not lead prayers in public schools, I'm with the "good news" people on this one. As a matter of principle, the government should not be telling a private organization, in this case one dedicated to inculcating its young members with "old-fashioned" values undergirded by a belief in a duty to God, that it must accept people of different beliefs.
As a practical matter, though, I strongly suspect that, had Mark come to our door and wanted, simply, to join the Scouts, he'd have been taken in with little fuss - if Mom could have slipped him in, anyway. And no one would have been the worse, and maybe some would have been the better, for it. He's an agnostic, after all, not a Satanist. He believes human beings simply can't know if there is a God, and he takes an oath seriously, being willing neither to lie nor to compromise his principles to get what he wants.
He would have been the least worrisome of her little charges, believe me.
Mother could hardly be considered an authority on proper Scout procedure. She was a den mother for only one year, when my younger brother, Jon, wanted to sign up and she found there was no room for him in any established den. A number of other boys wanted to join too, though, and if she'd be willing to be a leader ...
You know how these things go.
My sister and I were drafted to help at the meetings because there was no other adult "volunteer." Mother was not about to go alone into a room full of little boys armed with Elmer's Glue bottles.
So I became a den sister, so to speak, and I remember our group fondly as sort of the F Troop of Scouting.
Most of the kids couldn't afford Scout uniforms, and Mom was assured that if they wore just the shirt and the neckerchief, which was the extent of my brother's uniform, that'd be fine. A few of the boys had just the neckerchief, though, and she settled for that.
Mike was our star, the kid who really looked like a Scout. He was the only one with the complete uniform, for one thing, and he showed up every Saturday morning in full regalia, cap and all. He was a strikingly handsome boy, with dark brown hair and eyes, but he did more than look the part of the well-groomed Scout. He worked conscientiously on every project, making each as well as he could, serious yet at ease, always likeable.
Then there were a couple of brothers in the den, Sonny and Steve, who tried to establish themselves as little toughs but who mainly straightened up when told to. Sonny was no taller than the other boys, but burly, while Steve was tiny and had the face of an angel - blue eyes, blond hair, a sweet expression. And he adored Sonny. Their parents, we were told, didn't spend much time with them.
And then there was Craig.
Craig was an average-looking kid, just a bit more rumpled and messy perhaps than the other rumpled little boys. He was a nice kid, not unkind in any way, but disruptive. He didn't seem to connect well socially, but he could get the group off track easily and did so regularly.
Perhaps he had what is now called Attention Deficit Disorder. Perhaps he had more on his mind than tying crepe paper to the beaters of our electric mixer, twisting it into a golden rope, then gluing it around a paperboard bucket - the boys' Mother's Day project. Craig lived with an aunt and uncle; we didn't know why. But we learned that after he left with his gift for "Mom," whatever it was supposed to be, he threw it into the creek across the street.
Or perhaps he was just different. He won my heart when the boys did their really big project for the year, a plaster wolf head. This was cast in a rubbery mold, then painted, and they worked on this with great enthusiasm. They did a good job, too, with Mike doing his usual meticulous work: fur gray, eyeballs white with blue irises and black pupils, tongue red - and no colors slopping over into the wrong places.
Craig's wolf, though, was different. He painted his bright purple, even the eyes, and its tongue red - and its teeth, and its lips. The molded wolves didn't have discernible lips, of course, but Craig's did. The red was blood, he explained lustily.
Ah, well.
The boys got along pretty well at the meetings, but Craig was always out there on the fringe. Which probably was why Sonny and Steve left ahead of him one day, hid in some bushes and ambushed him on his way home. It was a minor fight, certainly nothing by today's level of youthful violence, but it shocked Mother nevertheless.
She turned the brothers over to my dad, who told them there would be no one ambushed after leaving his house, and if anything similar happened again, they would not be able to come back. They could quit Scouts, or they could behave.
I figured we'd never see them again, but I was wrong. They came back for the goofy games and the popsicle-stick projects, and they caused no more trouble.
Jon lost interest in Scouting after that year, so our den disbanded. Mike joined another one, and the rest dropped out. We lost track of all of the boys. Years later, though, when my brother was in high school, I noticed a little story in the newspaper. A couple of brothers with the same name as Sonny and Steve had been arrested, and I figured it must have been them.
I've felt some regret since then that we didn't keep our little group together, though it is unreasonable to expect that its weekly meetings would have changed Sonny and Steve's lives all that much.
But I know it was a good experience for them, and for all those very different little boys, some a lot less Scout-like than Mark Welsh appears to be.
Isn't there a place in Scouting for someone who is helpful, strong, mentally awake and morally straight, but just isn't sure he's that way out of duty to God?
by CNB