Father Edward L. Correll, Jr.

Los Angeles, California

Born 12/20/43

Educated in Texas and Virginia public schools

AB 1968, Philosophy and Psychology from East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina (The University of North Carolina at Greenville)

Secular work positions include social work in North Carolina, teaching and educational administration in California, and retail management in Virginia.

Ordained 1983 to the priesthood in the Liberal Catholic Church Currently serving as rector of St Alban's Church, Los Angeles

The Church was established in 1916 in order to offer valid Catholic sacraments to theological non-conformists. It teaches the esoteric, Wisdom traditions which underlie the scriptures. Its fundamental point is that there is an indissoluble unity which forever obtains between the Creator and the created order.

I am glad to be a board member of Scouting For All in order to support its efforts to open the doors of the scouting tradition to all boys as its founder intended. The ban of atheists from scouting is another expression of Do-It-My-Way-Or-Else religious attitudes which are anathema to those who understand that the creative and loving Intelligence behind the universe lives at the center and core of every being.

To the degree that anti-homosexual prejudices are formed and empowered by the traditional religious attitudes of the West and our national history, they make of God an unreasoning, arbitrary and capricious caricature of that which, Itself, IS Strength, Compassion and Wisdom. One cannot "love the Lord...with all your mind..." who refuses to use his mind as far as it is capable of searching and understanding. The exclusion of homosexuals from participation in scouting makes the Boy Scouts of America a purveyor of the bigotry whose objective foundations have now been demolished by our best psychological and social research.

In fact, I believe that there is no religion higher than Truth, and that the religious expression of that Truth should keep pace with advances in scientific understanding. The Boy Scouts could and should be an especially valuable venue for the teaching of that idea.

Father Edward L. Correll, Jr.