The Script Never Changes

Three weeks ago, in an angry and inflammatory video, the “Secretary of War” bragged about pressuring Scouting America to roll back its policies on transgender kids. He wanted to turn back the clock: expel transgender kids, push girls out, and restore the good ol’ Boy Scouts of America.

He called inclusion “insidious, radical, woke ideology,” performing a familiar kind of macho outrage: loud, theatrical, and aimed at saving children.

Anita Bryant would have been proud.

I watched his six-minute routine and felt a sick recognition.

In 1990, the Boy Scouts expelled me for being openly gay. The first letter arrived days before my twentieth birthday. I was an Eagle Scout and an assistant scoutmaster, having spent more than half my life in Scouting.

What followed was a ten-year legal battle that ended at the U.S. Supreme Court: Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. I lost 5-4.

Over the next fifteen years, a grassroots movement did what the courts would not. Scouts, parents, corporate sponsors, and religious congregations pushed back, one troop and one council at a time. Scouting abandoned the same policy that expelled me. It later welcomed transgender youth and girls. Then, last year, it changed its name.

I assumed victory. I was wrong.

Today I listened to a new podcast about my case, and it brought back unsettling feelings that I thought I’d already worked through: fear, isolation, humiliation. I was a college sophomore, and the nation’s most esteemed youth organization told me that I was unfit, immoral, and unclean.

But what hit hardest was this: as I listened to the history of my own case, I felt a horrible sense of déjà vu.

Today, the targets are trans kids. The words have been modernized, but the song is the same. They call healthcare “mutilation.” They call identity “mental illness.” The language shifts and the excuses get updated, but the rot is identical.

I’ve lived through this moral decay before. For bigots, simple hatred is never enough. They insist on our consensus. They require us to be complicit in our own erasure. They demand we nod along as they dismantle human dignity.

I recognize every move because this script was used to litigate my existence for a decade. I was a sodomite, unclean, and immoral, and compared to a rapist, murderer, and a sexual predator. The past never stays silent; it just returns with better branding, familiar fears, and new kids in the crosshairs.

I’m writing today because I know the heavy coldness of exclusion when it’s paraded as morality. I’ve carried that burden before. I won’t sit by and watch them strap it onto a new generation in silence.

If you have a moment, give the podcast a listen: Amended! Liberty’s Guide to the First Amendment.

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I hope you’ll stick around and join me. I have more to say.