Documentary Review: “Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts ofAmerica”

Documentary Review: “Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts ofAmerica”,Like astronauts Neil Armstrong and Guion Bluford, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and movie directors Steven Spielberg and David Lynch, I am an Eagle Scout. In Lynch's case, he used to approve only one biographical sentence in press notes delivered to movie critics whenever he had a film coming out. "David Lynch, Eagle Scout,…

Documentary Review: “Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts ofAmerica”

Like astronauts Neil Armstrong and Guion Bluford, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and movie directors Steven Spielberg and David Lynch, I am an Eagle Scout. In Lynch’s case, he used to approve only one biographical sentence in press notes delivered to movie critics whenever he had a film coming out.

“David Lynch, Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.”

I always thought that was cool. But any Scouting recognition lost a lot of its lustre in the early ’90s, when a century of sexual abuse and its cover-up came to light in Patrick Boyle’s damning expose, “Scouts Honor.” My father was a Scoutmaster, and I remember talking with him about the book and the TV coverage that erupted when the many “local” stories turned into a national scandal.

He and I encountered scores of Scouts and Scout leaders over the years. Neither of us had a clue, which tells you…nothing. Because that’s the way the Boy Scouts of America “handled” this “problem” for decades. It was covered up. Kids generally are afraid and ashamed to talk of abuse while its happening, and there weren’t any whispers either of us heard about Scout leaders and troops in our corner of rural America.

But as the new documentary “Scouts Honor” makes clear, it was going on from the beginning of the Scouting movement in England. The Boy Scouts of America would publish “Red Flag” lists of pedophiles whod been caught and might try to “volunteer” with a new troop in a new town way back in the 1920s.

“Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America,” delivers just what its title promises, apalling accounts of decade after decade of minimizing horrific abuse by serial boy-rapists, a scandal so big it “dwarfs” the “Catholic Church and Baptist Church” scandals, as one expert testifies in the film.

Brian Knappenberger’s film is built around testimonials of many men who have come forward to sign onto the lawsuits that pushed the Boy Scouts of America into bankruptcy, and interviews with Boyle, who blew the lid off this national “corporate” scandal, with BSA insider and whistleblower Michael Johnson, Scouting’s first “Youth Protection” officer, a veteran child abuse investigator with the Plano, Texas, PD, and former Scouting legal counsel Steven McGowan, who correctly states that “We’re a microcosm of entire society. If we had a problem, our society had a problem.”

Most of what McGowan says on camera comes off as “deflection,” blame-shifting and in Johnson’s words, “lying.” Johnson, who came on board long after the national scandal blew up, complains that the culture hasn’t changed and that too little has been done to prevent pedophiles from pursuing a Boy Scout association to aid their predations.

“Why did you choose the Boy Scouts,” one convicted sex offender (in prison) is asked? “Because they made it so easy.”

The victims’ testimonies can be heartbreaking and infuriating — a brother remembering his younger sibling who killed himself, as a teen, after being molested by a Catholic priest/schoolteacher and Scout leader in New Jersey in the ’70s, and most chilling of all, the “sex ring” that suspiciously “single men” set up with New Orleans Troop 137, creating and running child prostitution with poor boys in the city and “clients” passed off as “visiting Scout leaders” flying in from Europe, as if jetting in to a Third World “anything goes” brothel in Bangkok.

Knappenberger digs into the “secret files,” and the takes his film into the “after this became public knowledge” years. The “problem” continued largely thanks to the pigheaded homophobia of the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church, which played a larger and larger role in Scouting — basically running it in recent decades — until the LDS Church dropped the BSA (in 2019) after the organization lifted its ban on gay Scoutmasters in 2015.

Homosexuality and pedophilia are not related, one is not a predictor factor in the other, with no scientific correlation found.

Experts in the field of child abuse, survivors and lawyers involved in the class action suit liken this to every “boarding school,” “Catholic Church” and “Baptist” scandal writ larger mostly thanks to the long records the non-profit corporation has kept, its “Perversion Files,” recognizing a “problem” and treating it as a PR issue, something they needed to keep quiet lest the “brand” become impossible to market to new generations.

When victims were asked to come forward to tell their stories for the class action lawsuit, over 80,000 did.

After this damning indictment of a film, Scouting’s “Norman Rockwell,” “patriotic” and “American values” image will never be the same. The life skills those of us lucky enoug And any cachet Spielberg, George W. Bush or me and my Eagle Scout friends could claim from that is forever tarnished, even if the organization avoids being put out of business in bankruptcy court and its ordained payouts.