Boy Scouts of America Reaffirms Ban on Gays Molly Hennessy-Fiske - Los Angeles Times
July 20, 2012

Philadelphia’s Boy Scout headquarters. (Matt Rourke/Associated Press)

The Girl Scouts have vowed to not exclude gays and lesbians. So have Boys & Girls Clubs and Big Brothers Big Sisters.

But on Tuesday, the Boy Scouts of America reaffirmed its ban on gays, a decision experts say reflects the conservative values of many members and the influence of two powerful benefactors — the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches.

The Boy Scouts' chief executive, Bob Mazzuca, says he thinks there is broad-based support for the policy, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2000.

"The vast majority of the parents of youth we serve value their right to address issues of same-sex orientation within their family, with spiritual advisors and at the appropriate time and in the right setting," Mazzuca said Tuesday in a statement.

For those who want to scrap the policy, the decision was a sign that, if change does come to the Boy Scouts, it will be prompted not by outside groups but by members of the scouting community.

Zach Wahls, a 20-year-old Eagle Scout from Iowa with two lesbian moms, is among those hoping to end the ban.

"I respect the Boy Scouts' rights as a private organization to dictate their own membership — it makes sense to me that they wouldn't allow girls to join the BSA," said Wahls, who helped found Scouts for Equality, a group opposing the policy on gays. "But we aren't some outside group litigating, trying to get the Boy Scouts to change policy."

The policy is essentially "don't ask, don't tell." Although the group "does not proactively inquire about the sexual orientation of employees, volunteers or members," according to spokesman Deron Smith, "we do not grant membership to individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals or who engage in behavior that would become a distraction to the mission" of scouting.

Tuesday's announcement came after a confidential two-year review by an 11-member Boy Scout special committee formed in 2010, Smith said.

Smith declined to identify committee members, but said they represented "a diversity of perspectives and opinions." He would not comment on whether the decision was influenced by the Catholic and Mormon churches.

The policy has prompted a slew of protests and spawned dissenting groups, including Scouting for All and Scouts for Equality, which claims about 500 members, many of them Eagle Scouts like founder Wahls.

"We are a group of scouts who love the organization and want to see the change happen from within," Wahls said.

More than 300,000 people have signed a petition urging the Boy Scouts to reinstate Jennifer Tyrrell, a lesbian who was forced to resign as a den mother in Ohio this year. Protest organizers plan to deliver the petition and meet privately with officials Wednesday at Boy Scout national headquarters in Irving, Texas.

Wahls said he and other protesters had been encouraged in recent weeks to see at least two members of the Boy Scouts' national executive board come out against the policy — Ernst & Young Chief Executive James S. Turley and AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson. Stephenson is set to become president of the board in two years.

Turley and Stephenson did not comment on the announcement, but AT&T released a statement saying that "diversity and inclusion" are part of the company's culture and that "our belief is that change at any organization must come from within to be successful and sustainable."

Boy Scout membership has dropped in recent years but is still sizable: 2.7 million, Smith said. Of those, about 400,000 belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church encourages members to become involved in Boy Scouts, and has its own section on the Boy Scouts of America Web page.

Unlike Girl Scouts, Boy Scout troops are sponsored by groups, including many Catholic and Mormon churches. When the Boy Scouts faced legal challenges to its policies excluding gays, girls and atheists in the 1990s, Scout leaders — many of whom belonged to one of the two churches — started to weigh the value of that sponsorship against the will of the membership, experts say.

Jay Mechling, a professor of American studies at UC Davis and a Boy Scouts volunteer, called retaining the policy on gays "a business decision based on religious pressure."

"That's not to say there aren't leaders in the Boy Scouts who feel strongly about morality and homosexuality. But when they see a lot of the troop leaders are churches, they go the direction they think is going to be healthiest for having the most boys registered," Mechling said.

Mechling, 67, is an Eagle Scout who spent 25 years researching the organization for his 2004 book, "On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth."

He said he saw firsthand how the Mormon Church became entwined with Boy Scout leadership, sponsoring troops and camps in the San Gabriel Valley and Catalina Island. He also saw troops and councils elsewhere in the state that quietly accepted gay leaders and members.

"There really is a policy of 'don't ask, don't tell,' because the official Boy Scouts policy is that people's sexuality is not what the Boy Scouts is about," Mechling said.

A resolution to allow gay leaders to be accepted locally was submitted to the board at the Scouts' annual meeting in May and was due to be considered later this year, but Tuesday's announcement killed it.

"What happened today is a sign they are now a conservative youth organization," said Marc R. Poirier, a former Scout and Seton Hall University law professor who has written about the Scouts.

Poirier said he didn't see the Supreme Court ruling on the Scouts being either expanded or challenged anytime soon. The court held that, as a private group, the Scouts could establish membership rules. But as the population ages, he said, polls show opinions will change on gay issues, making it more likely that the Boy Scouts will see change from within.

"In another 10 years, the people running the Boy Scouts organization will come from that generation. Whether they come from a conservative cohort is my question," Poirier said.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Times staff writers Laura J. Nelson and Ralph Vartabedian contributed to this report.

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