The All-Important Brand

Trey Smith

People don't have the same faith as before in society's institutions. While our government has always been secretive, the Obama administration has taken this shrouded veil to new heights by instituting it own form of a "death panel."

The Christian Church in its many forms has lost a good deal of trust too. The Catholic Church has been beset with a rash of sex abuse scandals as have many fundamentalist churches as well.

Educational institutions aren't immune either. College sports has seen one scandal after another with the Sandusky affair at Penn State University the absolute nadir.

Recently, we learned that the Boy Scouts of America has sunk into its own muck.

Internal documents from the Boy Scouts of America reveal more than 125 cases in which men suspected of molestation allegedly continued to abuse scouts, despite a blacklist meant to protect boys from sexual predators.

A Los Angeles Times review of more than 1,200 files between 1970 and 1991 found suspected abusers regularly remained in the organization after officials were first presented with sexual misconduct allegations.

Predators moved from troop to troop because of clerical errors, computer glitches or the Scouts' failure to check the blacklist, known as the "perversion files," the newspaper said.

In at least 50 cases, the Scouts expelled suspected abusers, only to discover they had re-entered the organization and were accused of molesting again.

In each of these cases, the evil of the initial transgression is compounded astronomically by the cover-up. What was bad enough as it is becomes ten times worse because the leaders seemed more concerned about the brand image than the victims themselves.

In our consumer society, the brand -- name, product, service or logo -- is all that matters. People can be hurt and money can be squandered, but protecting the so-called integrity of the brand takes precedence.

No wonder no one trusts much of anything anymore!