IRVING, Tex. — The Boy Scouts of America, which reconfirmed last summer its policy banning openly gay people from participation, then said last week it was reconsidering the ban, said on Wednesday that it would postpone until May their decision, as talk of gays in the ranks has roiled a storied organization that carries deep emotional connection and nostalgia for millions of Americans.
An end to the national ban on gays, which the United States Supreme Court said in 2000 was legal free speech by a private organization, would create a huge new moment of risk, experimentation and change by people on both sides of the issue said. The proposal floated last week would allow local scouting councils to decide membership rules for themselves.
The proposed change create multiple fracture lines. Some supporters of the ban said they feared a wave of departures by conservative church-sponsored troops, while supporters of the change said that scouting, with fewer boys every year donning the forest green uniform to work for merit badges, would be revitalized. Scout leaders who favored a complete about-face on gays — prohibiting discrimination everywhere in the organization — said the compromise position by the Executive Board would still leave scouting open to charges of homophobia by its critics, since discrimination on the basis of gender orientation would still be allowed locally.
Other Scout leaders and parents said a fracture between conservative scout councils and liberal ones could create walls — troops still banning gays disdaining gay-led troops, and vice versa — or could open the door to a new dialogue about difference and diversity.
The debate over the issue, according to scout leaders and parents, was shaped by two great historic forces that have defined scouting for decades: The huge role played by churches in sponsoring scout troops, and the tradition of local control that scout chapters, or councils, have had in shaping the flavor of scouting, which can differ greatly from urban downtowns to rural farm country, and from roughing-it-in-the-woods to environmental cleanup on the beach.
Maintaining local control became a crossroads of the debate. Although many of the church sponsors — almost 70 percent of local scout units are backed by a religious-based group — are culturally conservative, and might in some cases be opposed to open acceptance of gays in society, they also hugely cherish the right to make scouting a cultural adjunct of their respective belief systems. In Mormon-led scout troops, a Mormon prayer usually opens and closes a troop’s meeting, while in a Catholic group, it might be the Lord’s Prayer.
“In a free society, organizations fail or flourish according to the private choices of innumerable families,” the Boy Scouts said in a brief to the United States Supreme Court in 2000 — a case won by the Boy Scouts in a decision that held the ban on gays to be a protected statement of free speech. “A society in which each and every organization must be equally diverse is a society which has destroyed diversity,” the Boy Scouts argued.
Jay L. Lenrow, who grew up in scouting as a Jewish boy in New Jersey, and stayed involved as an adult scout volunteer in Baltimore, where he works as a lawyer, said he thought that religious diversity was a huge strength in scouting’s past. He said he hopes that acceptance of opposing views about gay leaders — troops and families and churches choosing different paths, to allow gay volunteers or not — will become an enriching element of the scouting experience going forward.
“As a youth in scouting, I sat in tents during the night after lights out with my Catholic friends and my Protestant friends, and kids who were Armenian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, and we would tell each other what it meant to us to be a member of our religious grouping and what the principles were and what we were taught,” he said. “What that led to is, first of all, an understanding of what made my friends tick and, second of all, an appreciation for their feelings and their religious beliefs.”
Boy Scouts Postpone Decision on Gays
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Boy Scouts Postpone Decision on Gays
