by Chad Groening and Jody Brown
(AgapePress) – A legal group is demanding that the Public Broadcasting Service give equal time to defenders of the Boy Scouts to tell the Scouts' side of the controversy over their prohibiting openly homosexual men from serving as scoutmasters.
Bob Carleson is chairman of the American Civil Rights Union, which he says is the conservative version of the ACLU. Carleson says his organization is outraged that last month PBS aired a taxpayer-funded program called Scout's Honor, which he says was hostile to the Scouts' pro-family stance and “an unveiled attack” on the organization.
“It called them 'haters,' it called them all kinds of other names, and in effect said that they discriminated against gays and people who did not believe in God,” Carleson says. “It was a very negative piece, and it was financed to a certain extent by taxpayers through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
Carleson, a former policy advisor to President Reagan, says he has contacted PBS, demanding that as a taxpayer-funded entity it has an obligation to fund and present a program that gives Scout defenders equal time. “I wrote letters to the chairman of PBS … and the ITVS [Independent Television Service] and, in effect, demanded that they give us funding to present a film that would defend the Scouts and give the Scouts' position on this issue,” he says.
Carleson says PBS will not give equal time to the Scouts' point of view unless it hears from thousands and thousands of taxpayers who support scouting. (To contact PBS click here.)
The ACRU was established in 1998. The group's policy board includes former Attorney General Edwin Meese, Judge Robert Bork, and former Director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Linda Chavez.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
