Officials Ban Boy Scouts From Planting American Flags On Veteran Graves
on May 15, 2020
The Department of Veteran’s Affairs announced that the long-held tradition of the Boy Scouts planting flags on the graves of fallen veterans will be forbidden on Memorial Day due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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In fact, all Memorial Day events on May 25th, 2020, are canceled this year according to the VA. The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other patriotic groups were particularly upset to hear the news and have been speaking out against it.
Patriots in Long Island, New York, are reportedly demanding that the VA reconsider this decision because there are more than 500,000 veterans buried in Calverton National Cemetery and Long Island National Cemetery that need to be honored. Those two cemeteries hold more veterans than any other military cemetery in the United States and have never missed flags being planted on the graves on Memorial Day.
“If we can’t figure out a way to make sure we are placing flags at their graves to honor them, then something is seriously wrong,” Steve Bellone, the Suffolk County executive told FOX NEWS.
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Steve said he’s very confident that officials can create a strategy to keep the Scouts safe while abiding by the CDC guidelines. He asked the VA to allow the national cemeteries to decide with their local health department if it is safe for the Scouts to plant the flags, rather than telling all cemeteries across the whole country they must cancel the event.
“It is understandable to a point, but I don’t think that it is unreasonable to be able to put a plan together to be able to still accomplish the same thing we have done year after year, still following social distancing guidelines, having everybody masked up, with gloves on. It’s definitely doable,” 18-year-old Eagle Scout Kieran Monaghan said.
