Boy Scouts: Time to end the gay ban?

The Boy Scouts of America are finally living up to “their professed ideals of fairness and respect,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial. After years of pressure from powerful donors and petition drives, scouting executives this week proposed ending the movement’s blanket ban on gays joining as scouts or adult leaders. Instead, the organization would allow individual chartering groups—70 percent of which are religious organizations—to decide whether to admit homosexuals. “This cautious plan is not exactly bold moral leadership,” said The Washington Post. It would allow troops sponsored by Catholic and Mormon churches to continue discriminating. That patchwork approach will complicate joint events like summer camps and “camporees,” which bring together troops from across the U.S. But the inclusion of openly gay scouts at such events could help the Scouts see that they pose no danger, and speed the organization’s slow progress into the 21st century.

This is not progress—it’s “equality run amok,” said Mark Davis in The Dallas Morning News. “A fundamental presumption of Boy Scout life is that no one in the tent is attracted to the same sex.” If close-quarter interaction between hormonal teens really is of no concern, then “bring on the coed tents with Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts in adjacent sleeping bags. If we’re going to have equality, let’s have equality!” Opening some chapters to gays will destroy scouting, said Edward Whelan in the New York Post. Without the protection of a uniform national policy, homosexual activists would surely bring ruinously expensive discrimination lawsuits against units that didn’t admit gays, forcing the whole organization to cave in. As the father of an Eagle Scout, I have always seen the Boy Scouts as a bastion of “traditional moral standards.” If that changes, parents like me will withdraw our sons.

Because of what I learned as an Eagle Scout, said Nick Gillespie in The Wall Street Journal, I couldn’t disagree more. The Scout Oath commands members to be adaptable to changing circumstances, and to be “morally straight.” Excluding some kids because of who they are is morally wrong. That’s why I haven’t allowed my two sons to join the Scouts. By the time my boys become fathers, I hope, the Scouts will be a more tolerant organization, and “they will feel comfortable enrolling their own children in the Scouts.”

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