Showing posts with label The roles of men and women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The roles of men and women. Show all posts

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Conservatives need to stop saying stupid stuff.

Candace Owens claimed, and I quote:

I would be terrified if I got onto a plane and I saw a woman flying the plane.

Madison March, Air Force Officer and fighter pilot, and Miss Colorado.*

Oh, horsecrap, she would not be.

And that's just a stupid thing to say on multiple levels. 

For one thing, if you "got onto a plane" and saw anybody flying it, apparently you are engaging in some fancy movie gymnastics a la Sisu, as when you get on planes, you might see the pilots in the cockpit, but they're sitting there waiting for people to board the planes. 

And unless you last got on an airplane in about 1979 or so, you've seen women flying them.

What Owens is attempting to say is that United Airlines' CEO was quoted regarding a desire to hire female pilots on an employment diversity basis, and her point is that this means they aren't hiring some qualified male employees in order to fulfill the quota.

Well, okay, but that requires a little more attention to presentation and detail to say that. First of all, in order to be a commercial airline pilot, you have to have a lot of hours.  American rules are so strict that compared to the rest of the world, introductory commercial pilots are much more experienced than those of other nations.  

Secondly, while I do have a problem with women in combat (I have an old post on it I've never finished), women have been flying aircraft since Raymonde de LaRoche took it up in 1910.


The former actress and engineer did die in an airplane wreck in 1919, but if you look at the history of early aviators and find those who lived very long, they're the exception to the rule.  At any rate, by World War Two flying female aviators were so common that the US was using them to ferry every type of aircraft we used to the combat recipients, and even the Germans, who famously sought to avoid using women in anything but the home making and baby creation department, used some female aviators (and oddly enough, as anti-aircraft gun crew members).

Which brings me to this.  I'm familiar with efforts to readjust the scale on occupations through gender based selection personally.  I can't say for certain, but a couple of appointments that I put in for over the last thirty years went to women because that probably weighted in their favor for this reason. But, having said that, they weren't bad choices at all, and are really good in their jobs. Same thing at work. They were qualified to start with. Too bad for me, I guess, but that doesn't mean the choices were bad ones at all.

Which gets to this.

I am a conservative, and a real one. But saying stupid stuff, to include anti-scientific stuff, makes all conservatives look dumb, and frankly weighs the scale towards dumb.

Most people hearing Adams say this will just think, "well that's dumb", but somebody somewhere, as Adams is a populist hero, will in fact think; "doggone it. . that's right. . wimmin ain't outto be flying them big machine, why they'll panic and crash everything. . hand me another Bud, will ya".

Now, mind you, the left does this too, but with Donald Trump being the flag bearer for the political right, right now, and Trump regularly saying stuff that is dumb, the political right really has attention drawn to itself on these sorts of statements.  Indeed, as real conservatives have fled the party, or gone into seclusion, those who are willing to say real stupid stuff, such as the US is going to "liberate" Canada, or that the January 6 rioters were tourists, have become numerous. As the tolerance for their statements grow, they become more numerous in and of themselves.

There is a real place for conservatism in this country.  That's being completely lost.  Unfortunately, as it looks more and more like Donald Trump will return to office, people willing to tolerate him and things said in his support are increasing, when it is already well established he cannot be controlled, and that his followers cannot be either.

Saying stupid stuff doesn't help that.

Footnotes:

*Hey, just so we can show we're no slackers, in 2023 Sgt. Rebecca Bridger, a bandsman, of the Wyoming Army National Guard was our state's Miss Wyoming.


Okay, she's not combat arms and doesn't fly planes, but still.

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Monday, January 7, 1974. Sweden rations gasoline.

Gas rationing began in Sweden, the first Western nation to do so in response to the ongoign crisis caused by the Arab Oil Embargo.

The four-year-long Gombe Chimpanzee War broke out in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park.

Margaret Queen Adams.

Margaret Queen Adams, née Margaret Queen Phillips, the first female deputy sheriff in the United States died at age 99. She had served in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department from 1912 to 1947.  She worked in the evidence department.

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Sunday Morning Scene. A Reddit Exchange.

 An interesting Reddit exchange:

Subreddit Icon

r/AskAPriest

•Posted by u/ajm1211

Why can’t women preach the gospel or become priests?

1 Timothy 2:12

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.

1 Corinthians 14:34

The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says.

I’ve seen these quotes from The Bible but is there any other reason?

Is that what these quotes refer to?

Almostreverend

7 hr. ago

Maronite Priest

Women can, should, and do teach and preach the Gospel. Just usually not in the mass. Do you seek out and listen to holy women's voices in how to live the Gospel and what Jesus teaches?

Now with regards to priests. I would like to ask you a philosophical question. Are men and women different? If they are different is it possible that there are some things men can't do and some things women can't do? What are those things? If they are the same what difference would it make?

7 hr. ago

Hi, that’s what I meant, they can’t teach in a Christian gathering.

Of course they are different. It’s just there is a big argument behind if they should be allowed or not depending on the Christian denomination people are in.

I was hoping for a more definitive answer as to why if I’m honest lol

Almostreverend

6 hr. ago

Maronite Priest

They are allowed to teach in Christian gatherings, it happens all the time. It doesn't matter what each denomination thinks only what Christ taught.

ajm1211

OP

·

4 hr. ago

So why does Catholic.com say different?


There were other roles that Christ had in mind for women. For example, they played a key role in the spread of the Gospel, being the first to spread the news of the risen Christ. They were also allowed to pray and prophesy in church (1 Cor. 11:1–16), but they were not to assume the function of teaching in the Christian assembly (1Cor. 14:34–38; 1 Tim. 2:1–14), which was restricted to the clergy.


https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-cant-women-be-priests

robberrito

7 hr. ago

I am quite curious about this subject. Certainly women have special roles: men cannot bear children, after all. However, is it not… unbalanced in a sense that only one half of the human race is permitted to become able to do the sacraments? As a man, I will always be able to do that, and if I were a woman, I would never in my life be capable of doing these same sacraments. The sacraments are what life is centered around. Would that not make men more valuable in a sense? Not trying to be misogynistic or anything, just genuinely curious about your thoughts.


Almostreverend

edited 6 hr. ago

Maronite Priest

Anyone can baptize, but baptism is for the baptized not the baptizer. Lay people can't confirm, but the point of confirmation is to be confirmed. Lay people can't anoint the sick sacramentally, but the point of the sacrament is to be anointed. Consecrating the Eucharist is not an end in itself, but Christ's goal is that we take and eat.

The priesthood is not an end in itself, it is for others. It is so that others can know Christ. Guess what when we are baptized we become priests for others and we are called by love to bring God to them and them to God.

robberrito

6 hr. ago

Thanks. This makes a little more sense to me. I greatly appreciate your words.

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Tuesday, December 7, 1973. Women join the Coast Guard on a regular basis.

The United States Coast Guard accepted its first regular female members, Chief Warrant Officer Alice T. Jefferson, Yeoman First Class Wanda May Parr and Yeoman Second Class Margaret A. Blackman.


This came about due to the elimination of the Coast Guard's Women's Reserve.

Jefferson had jointed the SPARS in 1943 and remained in the Coast Guard until 1984, when she retired.  She passed away in 2019 at age 96.

The world's most dangerous airline, Aeroflot, crashed is Flight 964 at Moscow's airport, killing 16 out of 75 people on board.

Convicted child murderer Lester Eubanks was released for unsupervised Christmas shopping in Ohio and disappeared.  He remains a fugtive.

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Thursday, September 20, 1973. The Battle of the Sexes and the Death of Jim Croce.

"The Battle of the Sexes" took place in the Houston Astrodome between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King won three straight sets.

King and Riggs prior to the match.

This event was a big deal at the time, and I can recall my parents watching the television coverage of it.  It's always seemed odd to me as Riggs, who had been a tennis great in his youth, was well past his prime, while King was in hers.  Riggs, however, was quite the promoter and much of the attention can be attributed to that.

It was, up until that point, the most watched tennis match of all time.


Jim Croce, age 30, was killed along with five others when a chartered Beechcraft E18S hit a tree during takeoff from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Louisiana.  

Croce was a well known pop singer at the time.  When in grade school, one year we had to learn his Time In A Bottle song for a performance of some sort.  Perhaps it's for that reason, but I've never liked that song since then, and I didn't like it then.  Or maybe its just the song.  I have always liked his Leroy Brown song.

Thursday, July 27, 2023

Some random musings. Old Age, Worn Out Horses, Secrets.


The freeze

What happened to Mitch McConnell yesterday and to me 35 years ago.

An insightful article by Robert Reich, who experienced something similar.

While I'm sure that I'm beating a dead horse on this, this is yet again evidence that we do come with a wear out date, and we ought to accordingly be careful.  So should society.  A huge amount of our societal deposit of power is in the truly ancient.

Mind you, I don't agree with Reich on much of McConnell's record being repugnant.  He did a great job, in my view, with the Supreme Court.  That's one of the things that Reich now doubt feels is skunking up the room.  And by this point, McConnell's presence may truly be necessary as a brake on what would occur if Donald Trump regains the White House, as McConnell seems to be able to control Senate Republicans, which in part has kept the Senate from becoming the circus that the House of Representatives currently is.

McConnell is 81.

Our senior Senator is 71.  Our junior Senator is 68.  Our Congressman is 60.

The world is enduring a really hot summer this year.  This is hard to ignore.

Sixteen young Montanans have sued their state for embracing fossil fuels in the face of climate change.  Nothing like that has happened in Wyoming.  I don't know what the average Wyomingite under 30 feels about this issue, or believes about it, but I'll bet it's not the same for Wyomingites who are 60 and over.  We probably worry about it, if we do, in the context of our children and their children.  Of course, if you are our youngest member of Congress, which isn't to say young, you have no children to worry about.

It used to be wars that caused this sort of observation.  Old men started them, it was claimed, and young men fought them.  Now it seems that really old men start them and young men and women, given that we've grown more barbarous in recent decades and included women in this horror, fight them.  The "old men" of the 1940s mostly weren't all that old, in comparison to what we have now.  Anyhow, I really wonder what approach to many things we'd be taking if people who were at least under 50 years of age were at the wheel.

Would that this was so.

On a somewhat related item, I've really been noticing recently that collapses that should be obvious to those close to collapsing aren't, at least to some extent.  I guess if people have relied upon somebody for a long time, they'll just ride that horse until it collapses, and then they're surprised.  Even the warnings that the metaphorical horse gives, as it stumbles or becomes blurry eyed, don't mean much.  The horse is just whipped into carrying on.  When it rolls over and dies, the rider is surprised.

I've been noticing recently that certain people turn everything very much to themselves.

Maybe everyone does to some degree.  People are told a story, and they want to show it's relevant to them as well, so they tell something related.

That's not really what I mean.

Rather, because for most of us our own frustrations and sufferings are the ones we really understand, it's hard for some not to use those as an absolute yardstick.

Indeed, I've witnessed recently somebody who fits into the category above, they're heavily burdened and collapsing, and they're pretty much trying to get some support.  However, when they seek to get it, they instead get tales, mostly repeats, of the other persons' frustrating, but not really epic, work life.  While it would be a poor comparison, it would be like a person going into the emergency room and telling the receptionist that they have a gunshot wound, only to get a really detailed reply like "I know, let me tell you about how slow the lunch line is here".


In this case, the suffering soul is pretty much the plow mule for the household, and the mule is on its last legs.  It's pretty obvious, but it must not actually be within the household, or they're so used to it, it goes unobserved.  But the signs are sure there.  The collapse is coming, and I don't know how to stop it.  Only the people driving the mule probably can, and they don't seem to believe it's going to happen.

Of course, it's really hard to appreciate that giants fall.  Some big tree grows in the forest, and It's always there.  It gets old, starts to die, and then one day a windstorm comes by and knocks it over.  People are surprised until they look at the photos of it when it was in its vigor.

Some people are horrible about keeping secrets.

I don't mean that they can't keep them, I mean that they love secretes too much.

There are things in the world that need to be kept secret.  Some occupations have secret keeping as a feature of their nature, such as doctors, priests, and lawyers.

But other people just adore secrets. They make secret information solely for the sake of making it secret.

My long-suffering spouse is one of these people.  She loves secrets.

I was reminded of this recently as I have a medical procedure coming up.  It's not a secret, why would it be?  But she was keeping it a secret from her family. That's really nifty, of course, for me as I don't keep stuff like this secret at all, and I don't have any concept why a person would do that.  Of course, it caught up with me when I was texting to my father-in-law, as he was at a cattle sale.  I mentioned it as I thought he knew.  My mother-in-law was calling in an instant, to my wife.

Why was this a secret?

I don't know, but that was bullshit, and I have repeatedly told my wife that I hate this "this is a secret" crap.  It's so ingrained in her character, however, that it's impossible to break.  Minor routine information is secret to outside parties.

This is aided by the fact, however, that she's good at keeping secrets, a fact that's further aided by her being bad at conveying necessary information.  I'll often get really important news about somebody weeks after it's conveyed to her.

"Bob is dying of the Grip", I'll learn. Oh, when did we learn this?  Weeks ago.

Or, "don't forget, this weekend we're hauling cattle".  Eh?  I've already committed myself to working this weekend, when did you learn this?  Yeah, weeks ago.  "I forgot to tell you".

On the other side, I guess, I've come to absolutely detest secrets.  Only things that legitimately need to be kept secret.  I guess having lived a life of professionally keeping secrets, while watching lots of people keep stuff they shouldn't keep secret until it blows up in their face, has made me detest them.   

Oh, well.

Friday, July 27, 1973. Operation End Sweep Ends

Operation End Sweep, the de-mining of North Vietnam's waters by the U.S. Navy, came to an end after having been underway since February.


Carol Tipton became the first woman to graduate from the Toledo police force training cycle as a conventional, rather than separate female, policeman.  Female police officers were very rare in the US, and indeed everywhere, until the 1970s.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Monday, June 21, 1943. Spreading the Holocaust in the Baltic

Douglas SBD "Dauntless" dive bomber balanced on nose after crash landing on carrier flight deck, June 21, 1943.

Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler ordered that all remaining Jews in the Baltic States be transferred to slave labor camps.

Sarah Sundin notes, on her blog:

Today in World War II History—June 21, 1943: US Marines land unopposed at Segi Point, New Georgia, in the Solomon Islands. Detroit race riot begins between whites and Blacks.

The NFL approved the temporary Merger of the Eagles and the Steelers, something we reported on the other day.  The declined the proposal to merge the Bears and the Cardinals.

Occupied Greece saw action as the SOE destroyed a railway bridge over the Asopos and the Greek Liberation Army conducted an ambush in the Battle of Sarantaporos.

The US Supreme Court rules in Stack v. Boyle that a foreign born citizen could not have that citizenship revoked for joining the Communist Party.

Harvard rejected a proposal to admit women to its medical school.

Watching the mule auction this past Sunday brought me to a possible explanation as to why so many Western legal organizations like to feature cowboys in their propoganda.

And that's because it's honest, and manly, work.

Cowboy, 1888.   This is, for some reason, how lawyers often tend to see themselves.

It was Bates v. State Bar of Arizona in which the United States Supreme Court destroyed the professionalism of the legal profession.  In that 5 to 4 decision, the Court found that a rule of the Arizona State Bar preventing advertising violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It further held that allowing attorneys to advertise would not harm the legal profession or the administration of justice.

They were wrong.

As was often the case in that era, the majority had its head up its butt.  In reality, advertising destroyed decades of work by the early 20th Century American Bar Association and drug the occupation of being a lawyer from that of a learned profession down to a carnival barker.

Recently I watched the Netflix uploaded episodes of the Korean television series The Extraordinary Attorney Woo (이상한 변호사 우영우). In it, every one addressed attorneys by their patronymic and the title "Attorney", even if they were personally familiar with them.  So, for example, every time somebody addressed the central protagonist, they did so as "Attorney Woo".   That struck me as odd, so I looked it up to see if that was correct, and found a Korean language site entry that stated off with a comment that was something like "unlike the United States, attorneys in Korea are a respected profession".

That struck me, as I hadn't really thought about it like that.  When I started off in this line of work, we were still somewhat regarded as respected professionals and its hard to forget that's now in the past.

The decline was in, however, already by that time.  When we were admitted to the bar, Federal Judge Court Brimmer gave a speech about civility in litigation.  I've heard versions of it many times since. When I first started practicing, advertising was just starting here, and it was the domain of plaintiff's lawyers for the most part.  It still is.

Bates got us rolling in this direction, but the flood of 60s and 70s vintage law school graduates did as well.  Too many lawyers with too little to do, expanded what could be done in court.  Lawyers have backed every bad cause imaginable in the name of social justice. That's drug the profession down.

How we imagine ourselves.

I think we know that, which is why I think we also go out of our way to associate ourselves with occupations that have real worth.  We like conventions featuring the West, both for defense and plaintiffs, rather than sitting in front of our computers in office buildings in Denver and Salt Lake City.

Nobody, that is, wants to go to the "2023 Sitting On Your Ass Asking Insurance Carriers For Money" conference.  No, we do not.  We want to go instead to the "2023 Blazing Saddles and High Noon Conference".  

But what are we really?

How everyone else sees us.

It's a real red meat question, but it needs to be asked.  To some extent, civil litigation started off as a substitute for private warfare.  But now?  Many people have asked if this is a virtuous profession, but beyond that is it, well, manly?

Many lawyers aren't men, of course.  But if there are occupations that exhibit male virtues and natures, is this one?

Our constant association of ourselves with occupations that do, and the use of language borrowed from fields that are, suggests we don't think so.

As we really are.

Sunday, April 30, 2023

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cattle Time

Some sort of cleric in Imperial Russia, although I don't know the details.  I'm under the impression that Russian Orthodox Priests were not allowed to hunt, although Catholic ones certainly are.  Neither faith precludes hunting in any fashion, but I'm with the impression that the Orthodox ones may not due to their vows.  I could well be in error.  It's worth noting that the first Pope, St. Peter, was a Fish Hunter, which most people call a "fisherman".1

This is a very interesting post:
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cattle Time: Every spring I seriously revaluate whether running cows compliments the demands of my priestly vocation or not. As far as I can see, it agai...

I at first linked it in here, and then in pondering on it, I commented on the original post as well.  I'm adapting my comments to this here, and greatly expanding on them.

I've known a few Priests over the years, and been friends with a very small numbers. I found that the one that I related to best, on a personal level, was one from a radically different foreign culture, which was in part due to his intellect, but which was in part also due to the fact that he came from a highly rural background, as do I.

I've said from time to time that "I like men to have the bark on", by which I mean I like men to be men. When I was a kid, I recall my father being good friends with a Catholic Priest who would come to the house fairly often, and who shared a rural Nebraska background with my father. Their topics of conversation tended to be about bird hunting and fishing.2  Likewise, I recall my father stopping to pick up the Bishop and a priest traveling with him on the highway, as their car had died. The Bishop piled in our single cab truck and asked, "was the fishing any good?"

In contrast, at least one Priest I tried to reach out and be friendly with was absolutely unapproachable, as he seemingly couldn't talk about anything other than the Faith in an immediate context, and was hesitant to do even that in a ranging way.

Don't get me wrong, but what I think is that Priests have to be relatable to be effective. Christ went out amongst the tax collectors and the publicans. Peter was a fisherman. Paul was a tentmaker. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that if I'd run into Paul in context, I probably could have asked him "what's wrong with the seam on my tent" and have gotten an answer.

All of which is a long roundabout way of saying that I suspect your work as a stockman enhances a priest's calling as a priest, where it's genuine.

Fr. Allan Travers, S.J., who like Moonlight Graham, only got to play once in the major leagues.  He's supposedly the only Catholic Priest, which he was not yet at the time, to play in the Major Leagues, although I'd question that.

As do other (dare I say it?) manly things.  Hunting and fishing, going to baseball and football games, having a glass of Old Bushmills at a tavern.

At an upcoming synod, Pope Francis will have women religious vote for the first time.  I'm not going to second guess the Pope on that, but I'd note that one of the significant problems that "main line" Protestant religions, which are dying as the Reformation falls and fails (more on that later), have is that they've become highly feminized.  Setting aside the theological nature of this, it's a practical problem as it emphasizes a feminist view that there's no difference between men and women, when men and women know that there are.  This process attaches to the motherly, or sisterly, role of Christianity and diminishes from the fatherly in a way that frankly weakens it.  While I've seen no data on it, I suspect it also contributes to men dropping out of their parishes.

Catholicism isn't immune from this, although at least in the US it's pulling away from it.  For years, the Faith has struggled in a quiet struggle between the very orthodox and the Boomers, with the Boomers often taking a pretty liberal view.  Parish councils are often packed with Boomer women who look to the 60s and 70s as a golden era.  Younger Catholics do not tend to.  And, even though the rules pertaining to Extraordinary Ministers provide that they're only to be used if there's an absolute need, at almost any Mass an army of middle-aged to elderly women will pop up as soon as it is time to administer Communion.3  Protestant Churches that tend to retain a very strong male presence tend to be "Evangelical" Churches, although this is certainly not universal.

All of this is not to discourage a role for women in churches, but rather to encourage a male one.  Not every guy wants to be in the Knights of Columbus (I don't), but quite a few might enjoy taking a priest fly-fishing, bird hunting or go out for a beer.  Indeed, it's easier to relate to a guy on a guy's level if you know that he has some of the same interests that you do, other than the Faith.

When my father was in the Air Force during the Korean War, he played cards regularly with a group of friends.  My father, like his siblings, was a great card player.  His friends included a group of other Air Force officers, including at least two other dentists, and a Catholic Priest.  They were a mixed group, only my father and the priest were Catholic, but they were all united in their love of card games.

During that same era, the Korean War, Marine Corps general Chesty Puller actually received a complaint from a Protestant Chaplain asking the general to order Catholic chaplains to quit playing cards with enlisted men, as it was causing them to convert to Catholicism.  The general didn't do it.

There's something to think about there.

Footnotes:

1.  I've seen the no hunting for Orthodox priests somewhere in print, but I also have that impression from the fact that two Russian Orthodox priests stayed with my aunt and uncle for a time, while touring the US. This was in the 1970s, long before the fall of the Soviet Union.  They told my aunt and uncle that.

They also left an English language book that I scanned at some point, which was very carefully measured in its tone, particularly regarding the Russian Orthodox views about ending the schism.

2.  A lot of their conversation was fairly intellectual.

One random comment that stuck with me was the priest's comment about the spread of deodorant use by men, which is now universal.  The priest was bothered by it as he recalled how at the end of the work day, men came home smelling of the sweat of their honest labor.

3.  This fits in the "pet peeve" category, although I actually heard a guest Priest mention the same thing on a recent episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know.

Extraordinary Ministers are just that, extraordinary for extraordinary conditions.  However, since their introduction they've become common place and even at a Mass at which there is only a normal amount of parishioners in attendance, they tend to be used.  Priests in earlier decades managed to conduct a Mass to a full congregation without ever needing to use them, and for the most part, they are unnecessary now.  However, like other such accommodations, once introduced, it is hard to reverse, and the people who are Extraordinary Ministers are sincere Catholics whom the Priest no doubt does not want to turn away, even from a volunteer mission.

Having said that, I actually witnessed at a recent Mass a Priest turning a volunteer Eucharistic Minister back.  I don't know what to make of it, as he usually does use them, but he's highly orthodox and had the services of a deacon on that day.  A middle-aged/older woman stood up at Communion time and with a wave of the hand, he sent her back.

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Adoption in the past

This is, I admit, inspired by some Twitter outrage about an outrageous comment by a Congressman who is not a serious person.  I'm not going to engage in that topic, as people who are not serious people, do not deserve to be taken seriously.

Rather, I started to wonder how many people, say before 1950, and then again before 1900, grew up in a household where at least one of their parents was not their "natural born parent".

I know of nobody in my family, but I'll bet it's incredibly common.  And for that matter, as my mother came from Quebec, chances are really high that part of our ancestry stems from orphans on the Coffin Ships.  No formal adoption of such orphans was ever done.  It wasn't even really possible.  The Parish Priest just told the Québécois Parishioners that ships were coming in from Ireland, and there would be orphans on them, as their parents would have died crossing the Atlantic. They just went down to the docks and took them home, raising them as their own.  They were French, the children were Irish, but more than anything, they were all Catholic.  Their parentage would not have been kept secret from them, probably, but over time, with French surnames, Irish ones forgotten, nobody would have remembered.

Indeed, while I have some French ancestry, my DNA tracks back nearly 100% to Ireland, even though I know that I have German and French ancestors.  

Chances are high . . . 

Monday, April 17, 2023

Tuesday, April 17, 1923. Scouting in Casper.

I'm putting this edition of the Casper Daily Tribune up for one reason.


The article on the Boy Scouts.

It notes its explosive growth at the time, and that there was a troop in Mills. There's no troop there today.

Indeed, church troops, which this article notes, have really dwindled, although they still exist.  I know that in the 30s, St. Anthony's Catholic Church and St. Mark's Episcopal Church both had troops. They no longer do, although St. Mark's retains a cub scout troops.

According to the short search of it I did, today the local troops are:

6Units found near this ZIP Code

1
Troop 1035 American Legion George W Vroman Post 2
-1 miles
1868 S Poplar St
Casper WY 82601

Contact: Devin Hutchinson

Phone: (307) 337-1185

Email: devin930@hotmail.com

Boy Troop

Online Registration available for this unit.

Meets on Thursday nights at the church.

2
Troop 1167 Elks Casper Lodge
17.9 miles
3
Troop 1167 Elks Casper Lodge
17.9 miles
108 E 7th St
Casper WY 82601

Contact: Richard Summerton

Phone: (307) 259-8878

Email: rlsummerton@gmail.com

Boy Troop

Online Registration available for this unit.

Meets on Tuesday nights in the basement of the Elks Lodge.

4
Troop 1094 Casper Five Trails Rotary Club
18 miles
701 S Wolcott St
Casper WY 82601

Contact: Craig Dutcher

Phone: (307) 258-9379

Email: craigdutcher@hotmail.com

Boy Troop

Online Registration available for this unit.

Troop 1094 is dedicated to provide an educational program for boys and young adults to build character, to train in the responsibilities of participating citizenship, and to develop personal fitness. Our Troop camps during most months of the year, participates in several community service projects, and meets every Tuesday evening for regular meetings.

5
Troop 1113 First Christian Church Of Casper
18.1 miles
6
Troop 1013 First Christian Church Of Casper
18.1 miles
520 Cy Ave
Casper WY 82601

Boy Troop

Online Registration available for this unit.

Great Troop! Great fun! Meets on Monday nights at the church.


A few things to note.

Two of these are associated with a church, that being the First Christian Church.  Way back in antiquity when I was briefly a Boy Scout, even though I'm Catholic, that was the troop I was in.  I think this was solely because somebody we knew was in it, and I was invited.  In retrospect, I'm surprised that my parents didn't suggest I look at the St. Anthony's troops, which was still around at the time, although its members were no doubt mostly alumni of St. Anthony's school.

The George Vroman legion troop actually meets at College Heights Baptist Church, based on that address. So is it a church troop?  That's not clear, but probably not.  That Legion post meets at the National Guard armory, so it doesn't have its own meeting site, which might explain it partially.

Two of these troops are associated with service organizations, the Elks and Rotary.  Service organizations are on the decline as well, although both of those seem to be doing well in Casper.

Most of these troops have a girls troops associated with them.  The introduction of girls into what had been the Boys Scouts happened a few years back, and when it occurred it took all the LDS troops out of the organization.  They'd had a big presence in it.  The move also irritated the Girl Scouts, for obvious reasons.

I don't know if It's helped the Boy Scouts or not. They've certainly been in decline, but I suspect that the introduction of girls hasn't helped.  Mostly what it probably has served to do is to create one more way in which it's impossible for boys to be with men in a formal way. Scouting was reeling under homosexual rape/seduction scandals at the time, although I'm sure that some would object to that characterization, even though there really is no other way to accurately describe it given as it was obviously male on male.  I'm not claiming, of course, that male on underage female, and for that matter female on underage male, sexual abuse does not occur.  Indeed, in the last year there's been a host of female on underage male abuse reported nationwide from public schools, school teachers in general being the number one sexual abusers of the underage.  Something, suffice it to say, is really amiss in our society, as it is likely that all of this reflects a big increase in this conduct, not merely the discovery of it.  

At any rate, the introduction of girls into the organization wouldn't seem to be directly related, but in a way it was, designed to show that Scouting was cleaning up its act and becoming inclusive.  It could have addressed that in another way, as it really undercut the basic nature of the organization.

As noted, my connection with Scouting is thin.  I was only briefly a Boy Scout.  I shouldn't, therefore, really care too much about its decline, but still, it says something about the evolution of American society over the past century, and whatever it says, it isn't really a good thing that it's a shadow of its former self.

Scouting no doubt has a lot to compete with these days.  However, the irony of that is that when it was first formed, it did to, and in some ways was formed expressly for those reasons.