Year after seismic shift, Boy Scouts going strong
After abandoning a gay ban, membership has started to stabilize
NEW YORK — There were dire warnings for the Boy Scouts of America a year ago when the group’s leaders, under intense pressure, voted to end a long-standing blanket ban on participation by openly gay adults. Several of the biggest sponsors of Scout units, including the Roman Catholic, Mormon and Southern Baptist churches, were openly dismayed, raising the prospect of mass defections.
Remarkably, nearly 12 months after the BSA National Executive Board’s decision, the Boy Scouts seem more robust than they have in many years. Youth membership is on the verge of stabilizing after a prolonged decline, corporations which halted donations because of the ban have resumed their support, and the vast majority of units affiliated with conservative religious denominations have remained in the fold — still free to exclude gay adults if that’s in accordance with their religious doctrine.
Catholic Bishop Robert Guglielmone of Charleston, South Carolina, whose duties include liaising with the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, says he knows of no instances where a Catholic unit — there are more than 7,500 — has taken on an openly gay adult leader since the policy change. Gay sex and same-sex marriage are considered violations of church teaching.
The Boy Scouts’ national leadership “has been wonderfully supportive,” Guglielmone said.
Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention were unhappy with the BSA’s easing of the ban on gay adults, but did not call on individual churches to disaffiliate with troops that they sponsored.
A year later, the number of Southern Baptist churches that did cut ties with Scouting is “in the double digits,” far outnumbered by those who continued their sponsorships, according to Ted S. Spangenberg Jr., president of the executive board of the Association of Baptists for Scouting.
“We kind of like the way it looks,” Spangenberg said. “If you’re faith-based, it’s within your right to select the adult leaders who are going to uphold the tenets of your faith.”
Also pleased with the developments is Richard Mason, president of the BSA’s Greater New York Councils, serving nearly 50,000 youths in the New York City area.
In April 2015, the NY Councils played a key role in the BSA policy change, defying the ban by hiring an 18-year-old gay Eagle Scout to work at one of its summer camps.
Mason said the aftermath of the change has been overwhelmingly positive in New York. Some corporations and liberal religious groups that cut ties with the Scouts have restored them, he said, while the Catholic archdiocese has remained fully active.
Until last year, the Boy Scouts had adhered to a ban on gay adults for more than three decades, even taking a case to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, when it won a 5-4 decision upholding its right to have exclusionary membership policies.
That ruling fueled protests against the BSA by gay-rights supporters.
After internal debate, the BSA leadership decided in 2013 to allow participation by openly gay youth. But it faced continued pressure to ease its ban on gay adults serving as paid staff or volunteers.
At the urging of Robert Gates, the former defense secretary who was BSA president at the time, the Scouts’ National Executive Board voted 45-12 on July 27, 2015, to end the blanket ban on gay adult leaders while allowing church-sponsored units to maintain the exclusion for religious reasons.