Really good post from The Malcontent about Penn and Teller’s season premiere: 

For the past several years, ever since the landmark Boy Scouts of America v Dale case, I thought I had staked out a solid position: As reprehensible as I found the Boy Scouts’ discrimination against gays and atheists, I don’t cherry-pick the First Amendment.  I think that freedom of association is generally a good thing, because it means the assholes of the world will usually cordon themselves off where they won’t bother the rest of us.

But then came last night’s season premiere of Showtime’s outstanding series "Bullshit!"

Penn and the silent though emotive Teller laid bare the tangled relationship between the Boy Scouts and government, relying on an almost incalculable amount of public funds and accommodations to carry out Scouting activities.

See…this is the problem I’ve had with them when the case of James Dale came up.  You’d have had to be living in a cave not to know how much money the BSA sucks from the public teat for their own purposes.  Their annual jamboree, held with pentagon help and funding, costs the U.S. Taxpayer from what I’ve heard something between seven and eight million dollars every year.  That’s just the jamboree.  Atheists pay a portion to fund that thing.  So do gay and lesbian Americans, and the parents of gay and lesbian kids.  And without even they tiniest compunction or shred of shame, the BSA cheerfully takes that money and puts it into its pocket.

As an aside, a few years back when I worked in the Senate, I played a bit part in helping to turn back legislative threats to the Scouts’ dependence on government.  Even though I was accurately representing the position of my boss, I felt I could do so in good faith, based on my own experience in the Boy Scouts dating back to the early 1980s.  But as "Bullshit!" points out, the BSA was hijacked by the Mormon Church in the mid-’80s, and today I’m sickened that I didn’t know the full story before now.

You may have heard that Mormons have this reputation for being thrifty self sufficient hard working people.  That’s certainly the reputation I grew up hearing.  So either it wasn’t true all along or something’s changed since then, because now it seems as though self sufficiency is more like bigoted insularity, and thrift is not spending your own money so long as you can spend other people’s money.

The bottom line is, you cannot have private membership standards that exclude a good swath of the public while continuing to suck off the public teat…

Just so.  My feelings at the time of Dale were that that BSA had worked so diligently for so long to make itself into a national institution, and now that it had this special place in the law and in public funding, for it to suddenly claim it was a private religion based club when it suited its purposes to do so was such transparent hypocrisy it deserved to be thrown out of court.  They wanted that special place over all other youth organizations in American culture, that Norman Rockwell spot in American life.  Now they needed to accept that with that came an obligation to actually serve all American youth…not just the chosen few. 

That was the political issue as far as I was concerned.  But there was a moral one too, which made me furious.  The Boy Scouts were telling certain kids that they were lesser beings, destined to live immoral squalid lives simply as a matter of their religious beliefs, or their sexual orientation.  I don’t care what your religious beliefs are, to beat up on a kid’s deepest sense of themselves, their relationship to their creator, their emerging sexuality, is obscene.  It is a crime against humanity to take hope away from a child…to teach them that it’s pointless for them to reach higher, to strive for the best within themselves, to teach them that in fact they have no best within, only squalor they will never escape from.  You can argue that youth groups deserve some degree of public support, but only to the extent that they actually nurture America’s children.  An organization that takes some of America’s children and shoves their faces into the mud and then tells them that’s all they deserve in life is beyond contempt.  After all the BSA had strived to become to America’s children, somebody needed to hold them to their own damn standards.

But…no, this is not the America it once was.  The case came down against Dale and I was furious.  Okay…fine…they want to be a private club…let them exist as one…on their own dime from now on.  But judging from the religious right, and the ferocity by which they’ve fought to keep the BSA sucking at the public teat, you’d think hypocrits were Christ’s favorite kind of people.

Man…I wish I’d caught that premiere of Bullshit.  Over at Naked Writing, Jody Wheeler says they’ve signed on for two more seasons of it, but in the process of doing their shows they’ve managed to piss off just about every executive at Showtime so more then five aren’t likely.  Fine.  I was looking to see if any of the big cable movie channels were going to be running Brokeback and I saw Showtime was running Crash, so they’ve pissed me off.  Two more years of Bullshit is just about enough reason to keep subscribing despite that.  But barely.