Scout leader calls for change
Robert Gates says current ban can’t be sustained.
Robert Gates, president of Boy Scouts of America, says the organization’s long-standing ban on participation by openly gay adults is no longer sustainable.
The president of the Boy Scouts of America, Robert Gates, said Thursday that the organization’s longstanding ban on participation by openly gay adults is no longer sustainable and called for change in order to prevent “the end of us as a national movement.”
In a speech in Atlanta to the Scouts’ national annual meeting, Gates referred to recent moves by Scout councils in New York City and elsewhere to defy the ban.
“The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained,” he said.
Gates said no change in the policy would be made at the national meeting. But he raised the possibility of revising the policy at some point soon so that local Scout organizations could decide on their own whether to allow gays as adult volunteers and paid staff.
In 2013, after bitter in- ternal debate, the BSA decided to allow openly gay youth as Scouts, but not gay adults as leaders. The change took effect in January 2014.
Gates, who became the BSA’s president in May 2014, said at the time that he personally would have favored ending the ban on gay adults, but he opposed debate after the Scouts’ policymaking body upheld the ban.
On Thursday, however, he said recent events “have confronted us with urgent challenges I did not foresee and which we cannot ignore.”
He cited the recent defiant announcement by the BSA’s New York City chapter in early April that it had hired Pascal Tessier, the nation’s first openly gay Eagle Scout, as a summer camp leader. He also cited broader developments related to gay rights.
“I remind you of the recent debates we have seen in places like Indiana and Arkansas over discrimination based on sexual orientation, not to mention the impending U.S. Supreme Court decision this summer on gay marriage,” he said. “We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”
Gates said the BSA technically had the power to revoke the charters of councils that defied the ban on gay adults, but that doing so would be harmful to boys in those regions. He also noted that many states have passed laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, raising the possibility of extensive legal battles.
“Thus, between internal challenges and potential legal conflicts, the BSA finds itself in an unsustainable position, a position that makes us vulnerable to the possibility the courts simply will order us at some point to change our membership policy,” Gates said.
He expressed concern that an eventual court order might also strike down the BSA’s policy of banning atheists.
“Waiting for the courts is a gamble with huge stakes,” he said. “Alternatively, we can move at some future date — but sooner rather than later — to seize control of our own future, set our own course and change our policy in order to allow charter partners — unit sponsoring organizations — to determine the standards for their Scout leaders.”
Such an approach, he said, would allow churches, which sponsor about 70 percent of Scout units, to establish leadership standards consistent with their faith. Prime Minister Enda Kenny on Thursday urged Ireland’s voters to support the legalization of gay marriage in a referendum today that pits the power of the Catholic Church against his secular-minded government. Kenny said Ireland could“create history” by becoming the first nation to cast a popular vote for gay marriage. Catholic leaders and conservative groups are arguing that legalization could produce surprising repercussions in Irish courts that could undermine traditional marriages. Kenny’s government is holding a referendum because it’s considered legally necessary to add an explicit amendment to the country’s 1937 constitution before lawmakers can pass the relevant legislation.