Should Boy Scouts allow openly gay members?

Should the Boy Scouts allow gay members? News emerged last week that the Boy Scouts of America, which has long barred openly gay people from participation, was considering dropping that policy in favor of letting local sponsors decide membership rules. The organization delayed that decision this week at least until May.

Gay-rights advocates have long pressed the organization to open membership. But many churches that oppose homosexuality on moral grounds also sponsor local troops.

Should the Scouts loosen their policy? Should they stick to tradition? Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, debate.

Joel Mathis

Someday – maybe sooner, maybe later – the Boy Scouts of America will open its membership ranks to include gay men. It will be a great day for both groups.

Those new members will benefit from the discipline, skills and values that the Scouts have instilled in generations of young men. And the Scouts will benefit from the enthusiasm and participation of those who have been so long denied access – as well as the renewed engagement and support of many old members who have left the organization because of its anti-gay rules.

If you visit the site EagleBadges.Tumblr.com, for example, you’ll discover those rules have helped hollow the organization from inside. The site features letter after letter from former Scouts who have returned their Eagle badge – Scouting’s highest honor – to protest the organization’s membership policy.

“Perhaps, paradoxically, I wouldn’t feel the responsibility to take this action without the influence of the Scouts,” wrote one former Eagle Scout, Nathaniel P. May of West Virginia. “Scouts taught me a sense of citizenship – of acting on principle simply because people who do so govern themselves.

“The world I live in is crowded and diverse,” May added. “If I’m going to be a citizen, my actions in the world will somehow respect both its crowdedness and its diversity. An attempt to live in a comfortable, homogeneous world is a rejection of the duty of citizenship. It is with great pain that I acknowledge that the Boy Scouts of America has neglected this duty.”

Eloquent words. And they demonstrate something important: The Scouts wouldn’t change rules merely because of outside pressure, but because of the desires of so many people inside the organization.

The Boy Scouts would be good for its gay members. Gay members would be good for the scouts. Let’s hope that “someday” is someday soon.

Ben Boychuk

American liberals are very much in favor of freedom of speech and freedom of association – up to the point that their own pieties are offended. Then it’s war.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the Boy Scouts had a First Amendment right to exclude homosexuals from membership, liberal groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the AstroTurf (fake grassroots) group Scouting for All made it their mission to cripple the Scouts and attack their operations at every turn.

As a result, high-profile donors such as the United Way withdrew their support from the century-old organization, some former Eagles Scouts ostentatiously returned their badges, and a number of cities tried to ban the Boy Scouts from using public facilities.

Now, halting donations and returning one’s merit badges is one thing. But those cities’ efforts to squelch the Scouts were flatly unconstitutional. In fact, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in December shot down San Diego’s craven decade-old move to deprive the Scouts of their facilities on Balboa Island.

Despite winning in court every time, the Boy Scouts may surrender anyway. What a shame.

The policy change the Boy Scouts of America is considering originated with the national organization’s executive board, which includes several corporate CEOs who are themselves under enormous pressure from those aforementioned liberal groups. In the end, money may matter more than principle.

If the Scouts ultimately decide to let local chapters determine their membership rules, three things will happen. First, the ACLU and its allies will concentrate their fire on small scouting chapters that lack the resources of the national organization to defend themselves. Second, churches will abandon the organization in droves.

Third, and finally, a unique organization with a century-long tradition of teaching boys to be self-reliant men – “physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight” – will have been lost.

But postmodern liberal pieties will be well affirmed. Apparently, that’s the only thing that matters.

Ben Boychuk is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Joel Mathis is a writer in Philadelphia. Contact them at bboychuk@city-journal.org, joelmmathis@gmail.com or facebook.com/benandjoel.