The Boy Scouts of America is variously described as one of America's venerable organizations. In truth, for a culture that venerates Huck Finn and Beavis and Butthead, there has always been something vaguely un-American about the Scouts. The irony, according to one ex-Scout, is that the organization now typifies a moralistic culture that has lost its moral center. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez is author of "Days of Obligation" and the forthcoming "The Color Brown." He is a regular essayist for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and the Los Angeles Sunday Times.

I confess: I used to be a gay Boy Scout.

Now, it turns out that the Boy Scouts of America, described in various news reports as a "venerable organization," wants nothing to do with homosexual boys or with boys who refuse to pledge allegiance to God. The Boy Scouts of America has declared itself to be an organization for the God-fearing and the girl-loving.

This week in California, the State Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America indeed has the right to discriminate against gays and atheists. The Boy Scouts of America is not a business, the justices reasoned, so it is not subject to the state's anti-discrimination laws.

As it happened, one day after the court's ruling, two boys in Jonesboro, Ark., in camouflage clothing, opened fire on students and teachers at a middle school. One of the boys was reported to be angry at several girls who had broken up with him. The youth rampage was only the latest in a series in rural America, which otherwise imagines itself (against the morally corrupt city) as family-centered and God-loving.

In the 1950s, at my Catholic grammar school, despite my gay little secret, there was nothing very sexy about the Boy Scouts. Nothing sexy, certainly, about our Scout Master's bony white knees and brown shorts.

Don't get me wrong. I liked hearing ghost stories around the camp fire. I liked the roughhousing that ended our weekly meetings. It was "neat," I would have told you at the time, to be in a club in which girls were not allowed.

And I remain grateful that there were some men who, after a long day's work, were willing to spend their Monday nights teaching an unruly group of boys how to tie a square knot. But I have forgotten now how to tie a square knot, just as I have forgotten most of the Scout pledge. (Was our promise to "be square" part of the Boy Scouts or the more junior Club Scouts?)

Truth is, in a country that romanticizes Huck Finn and Beavis and Butthead, there was and remains something vaguely un-American about the Boy Scouts. The stress on regimentation, the fascist-brown uniforms -- there was something a little odd about the whole enterprise. And we knew it.

Every once in a while some 19-year-old with bad skin, an Eagle Scout, would be introduced to us. He wore a sash with lots of merit badges and looked like a young soldier waiting for war. Kids around me would snigger at his earnestness and someone would fart.

Today, when the kid shoots up his high school chemistry class, the explaining voices on TV are psychologists. They say something to fill the air on the evening news but they have no explanation about what ails America's young.

It is my suspicion that we are a moralistic country without a moral center -- and our kids know it. The Boy Scouts of America is an organization typical now in its moral bankruptcy. It preens, gives itself badges and medals for its moral orthodoxy. But it is an organization without moral authority.

Does anyone, for example, believe that the two little murderers in Jonesboro would have been saved if only they had joined the Boy Scouts?

My moral education as a boy did not come from the Boy Scouts of America. The Scouts were, for me, like Little League, an occasion for play. Nothing more. Nothing I read in the Scout manual remained with me into adulthood, as a counsel or guide.

What mattered to me as a boy was that I had parents who lived their lives with some rigorous sense of the right and the wrong. What mattered to me in those years when I was a Scout was that I had Roman Catholic nuns who taught me to consider my soul's obligations.

It makes me sad, these many years after the Boy Scouts drifted out of my life, to hear that the organization is in the hands of old fools. They fear the gay and the atheist amidst their ranks. They have no idea about the teenagers who are waiting in the forest, dressed in army fatigues.