Can A Scout Be Gay?

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But if it is hard to imagine Dale's spreading the word that gay is bad, his attorney, Evan Wolfson, says the Boy Scouts rarely convey that message themselves. He says the Scouts have never taken a position on homosexuality outside a court case. "The anti-gay view is never communicated to any member," Wolfson says. "The freedom of association turns on what brings members together. And scouting is not about bigotry." (Interestingly, the Girl Scouts have an antidiscrimination policy that is understood to forbid bias against lesbians--though Girl Scout leaders aren't supposed to display their sexuality in any way.)

Boy Scouts attorney George Davidson protests that their anti-gay position is "hardly under a rock," but he admits that if you check out SCOUTING.ORG, read the Boy Scout Handbook or go with your son to a troop meeting, you'll hear nothing about gays. He also acknowledges that, perversely, if they were more stridently anti-gay--if they were the Boy Scouts of the K.K.K.--they would have a clearer First Amendment claim that admitting gays would destroy everything they stand for. "Look, if this were a business, the Boy Scouts would simply put a few lines [of anti-gay rhetoric] in a corporate handbook and be done with it," says Davidson, who usually defends major businesses.

So why not? Because the Boy Scouts are torn between competing sides in the culture wars. One faction is composed of such sponsoring institutions as schools and fire departments--more and more of which have policies that prohibit discrimination against gays. Also part of this faction are liberal religious groups that have filed a brief on behalf of Dale, including committees from the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Together members of this faction sponsor some 22,000 Scout units (roughly 20% of the total). If the Scouts became a fiercely anti-gay group, many churches and schools would quickly drop them. That's why the Scout oath is so mushy, requiring its takers to be "morally straight," a term devised a century ago, before the word "straight" had a sexual implication. Today, however, it is the term to which scouting officials must point when asked for a statement of their views on gays.

For some, the Scouts have already gone too far in being anti-gay. The city of Chicago has battled the Scouts for more than four years. Its Commission on Human Relations ruled in 1996 that the Scouts broke a city ordinance when they barred former eagle scout Keith Richardson from applying for a job because he is gay. The next year the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued Chicago itself for sponsoring 28 troops of Explorers, a career-oriented Boy Scouts program for older youth. It was the first time a chartering institution, rather than the Scouts, had been sued. In 1998, the city relented and withdrew its sponsorship.