Throughout the 1970s and '80s, members of the health-and-safety committee of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) would periodically try to initiate discussions and workshops about sex. For the adolescents and teens among Scouting's more than three million boys, sex was a source of wonder and worry; the BSA might have been able to provide guidance on sexual development and abuse. But the BSA's most powerful constituents refused to allow it.

Psychiatrist Walter Menninger, the health-committee chair, later explained it this way in a deposition for a sex-abuse case against the BSA in 1987: "There are a number of sponsoring organizations, particularly the Mormon Church, that have made it quite clear they want Scouting . . . but they want . . . moral, sexual aspects to be strictly part of the church's teaching." Churches, he said, "have a substantial percentage of registrations [of Scouts] and [have] become a much more potent factor" in the organization's decisions.

Several months ago, the Mormons drew another line in the sand over a controversial issue: if BSA units (the troops and packs sponsored by religious and other organizations) must accept homosexuals as leaders, the church would drop out and take its 400,000 scouts -- about 12 percent of the BSA's total membership -- with it. (Sponsoring a Scout troop or Cub pack means taking the responsibility for running it -- everything from providing a meeting place and raising funds to choosing leaders.)

The ban on gay leaders is based on the last two lines of the Scout Oath ("To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight"). Ironically, the oath is modeled after the mission statement of the YMCA, which does not ban gays. Although the Scouts' ban has been enforced for decades, a growing segment of the religious organizations that sponsor Scout units now oppose it. And even the most ardent anti-gay denominations have no trouble sponsoring units in other organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, that welcome gay men and lesbians. All this raises a question: how did the Scouts get into this mess in the first place?

More than any other factor, the close relationship between the BSA and religious organizations like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) -- the Mormons -- explains why the BSA pursued its anti-gay policy all the way to the US Supreme Court. It also explains why the BSA stands alone among Boy Scout organizations around the world, and among other youth-serving organizations including the Girl Scouts, the Big Brothers/Big Sisters Association, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America (see "Gay Friendly," this page), in barring homosexuals.

When the Scouts first formed in the United States, the Catholic Church considered them hostile because the BSA worked so closely with the largely Protestant YMCA. There was "a lot of anti-Scout bias" in the Church because Scouting "had a very strong Protestant flavor," says David Peavy, a former member of the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, who is writing a book about the Catholic Church and the BSA.

Imported from England just after the turn of the century, the fledgling Boy Scout movement had found quick friends in the YMCA, largely because William Boyce, a BSA founder, and Edgar M. Robinson, the YMCA's first international secretary for boys' work, were acquaintances, according to Peavy and to a YMCA history being developed by the organization. Some YMCA clubs hosted Scout troops, and Peavy describes Robinson as essentially the Scouts' first chief executive.

The plan was for the BSA eventually to break out on its own, which it did after receiving a congressional charter in 1910. Modeled on the Scouting movement launched in England by war hero Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the American version differed in one key area: its more formal connection to religious practice. Baden-Powell had built British Scouting on religious principles, but the BSA added an 11th element to the Scout Law: "A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful to his religious duties." In case anyone missed that "go to church" message, the BSA constitution said, "No boy can grow into the best kind of citizenship without recognizing his obligation to God." And the BSA borrowed from the YMCA's three-tiered focus on "mind, body, and spirit," Peavy says, when it developed its oath:

Who could object to a boy's saying such a thing? Even the Catholic Church came around, prompted by priests who started Scout troops in their parishes and found the program to their liking. Several Christian denominations were struggling to create youth programs that would instill their religious values and also be fun for the kids. Catholic and Protestant churches alike found Scouting to be a perfect fit: the boys loved it, it had Christian underpinnings, and the BSA encouraged churches to mold their local Scouting programs according to their own religious-education standards.

This was the "genius" of the Boy Scout movement, according to William Murray, an early Boy Scout official who wrote The History of the Boy Scouts of America, published by the BSA in 1937. The LDS Church, in an amicus curiae brief filed with the Boy Scouts case before the US Supreme Court, put it best: "Because of Scouting's devotion to the spiritual element of character education and its willingness to submerge itself in the religious traditions of its sponsors, America's churches and synagogues enthusiastically embraced Scouting."

The BSA's approach benefited both religion and Scouting, as the Mormon brief says: "For many religious organizations . . . the Scouting program is a means of youth ministry. At the same time, sponsorship by religious organizations has enabled the Scouting movement to expand and increase its influence on the nation's boys."

By 1915, 4000 of the nation's 7373 Scout units were chartered to Protestant churches, according to an analysis by the American Family Association Center for Law and Policy, a conservative Christian group. By then the BSA also had a "Commissioner for Scout Work in the Catholic Churches," whose job was to promote Catholic units. In 1918, Peavy says, a letter from the Vatican bestowed the blessing of Pope Benedict XV on Catholic Scouting.

But no group embraced Scouting more enthusiastically than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Over the years, Scouting became the official youth-ministry program for Mormon boys. In a 1990 LDS newsletter, Apostle Thomas S. Monson said the Church and its troops "serve together; they work together." He added: "Every program I've seen from Scouting complements the objectives we are attempting to achieve in the lives of our young men, helping them strive for exaltation." Today the LDS Church sponsors 31,000 Scout units, more than any other group -- although United Methodist-chartered units account for slightly more Scouts (424,000).