Mormons upset by end of gay scout ban

• The Boy Scouts’ vote Monday to lift its ban on openly gay troop leaders was a blow to traditional faith groups heavily involved in scouting, but perhaps to none more than the Mormon Church, in which scouting and the religious life of boys are deeply intertwined.

Mormons have been deeply invested in Boy Scouts for more than a century, and any boy who goes to a Mormon congregation is automatically part of the Boy Scouts. The rites and rituals of the church are intentionally connected with those of the scouts: As members rise through becoming a deacon, a teacher and then a priest — rites of passage for Mormon teen males — at the same time you rise through scout positions as well. The local bishop selects scoutmasters. Many of the 16 presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints received high scout honours.

The Boy Scouts is, literally, the youth program of the Mormon Church for boys, a bond forged because the church saw their core values as the same: patriotism and devotion to God. The Mormon Church is also the largest Boy Scout charter; about 20 per cent of all scouts are Mormon.

The Mormon Church press office put out a statement Monday, saying leaders were “deeply troubled” by the lifting of the ban, as well as by the fact that they had asked for a delay in the vote because the church bureaucracy takes July off.

Facing litigation, the Scouts Monday approved a new policy allowing troops to pick openly gay volunteer leaders and banning discrimination in hiring employees. But it leaves individual troops and councils, most of which are faithbased, to choose leaders who reflect

I suspect there is some post-samesex-marriage-ruling jitters there

their values.

Church officials declined to elaborate on the statement Tuesday. But it puzzled some observers because the Mormon church has made highprofile efforts in the last year or so to soften its comments about sexuality and the place of gays and lesbians.

This spring, gay advocates and Mormon leaders in Utah made headlines when they announced they had been secretly meeting for many months and had hammered out a compromise to ban discrimination in housing and employment against LGBT people. Both sides said they were willing to recognize the needs of the other.

One detail of that compromise, however, may shed light on the new tension over the Scouts: the sole requirement church leaders had at the time was there be an exemption in the compromise legislation for the Boy Scouts, so they could continue to not hire openly gay employees.

Jim Dabakis, an openly gay Utah senator who was involved in that compromise, said the church statement was “puzzling,” but he suspected it was part of the overall flux in a country feeling the push-pull of competing rights — those of traditional religious believers and those of LGBT people.

“I suspect there is some post-same-sex-marriage-ruling jitters there,” he said, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent finding of a constitutional right to same-gender marriage. “It’s been a long, hard road on LGBT issues for all sides, and these social battles go back and forth. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.”