THE STREETS OF Washington, DC, were crawling with Boy Scouts during a trip I took a few weeks ago. Their national jamboree at nearby Fort A.P. Hill was about to begin, and hundreds of uniformed, sweating Scouts could be seen taking in the sights — checking out the FDR Memorial, poring over a map on the Mall, posing for photos on the steps of the Capitol.
On several occasions I said hello, and was mildly surprised at the response: quiet, polite — and wary. The Boy Scouts of America is an embattled organization these days, and for good reason. But somehow I didn’t expect that defensiveness to be directed my way.
Perhaps I appeared to be a typical liberal, full of sanctimony and ready to start berating them for their primitive homophobic policies. And, well, yeah. There is that side of me. But I’m also one of them: an Eagle Scout, the assistant leader of my son’s Webelos patrol, and someone who’s deeply concerned about whether Scouting can survive the troglodytism of its leaders.
A little more than a year ago the Supreme Court ruled in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that the BSA, as a private organization, has the First Amendment right to ban gay Scouts and leaders. The 5-4 decision struck me then — and strikes me now — as misguided. Scouting’s national officials are not freely elected by the membership; they are, rather, a self-appointed, self-perpetuating group of reactionaries based in Irving, Texas. "A bunch of rednecks" is what Michael O’Connor, a frustrated Scouting official from New York City, called them when he testified before the city council earlier this year, according to the New York Daily News. Neither Scouts nor their families have ever been asked for, or given their consent to, the BSA’s homophobic stance.
Moreover, the analogy drawn by Chief Justice William Rehnquist to the well-known case involving the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade seems dangerously off the point. Some years back the Court ruled on First Amendment grounds that parade organizers had the right to ban a gay and lesbian group from participating. But, as the organizers often pointed out, there were no doubt plenty of gays and lesbians already marching in the parade; it was a gay message they were seeking to ban. By contrast, in the case of the Boy Scouts, men and boys are being excluded because of who they are. As Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said about Dale in a June 2000 interview with Salon, the Court was able to justify the Boy Scouts’ discriminatory policy only by linking it through "a very weak kind of umbilical cord to the free speech clause."
Yet I’m actually somewhat optimistic — certainly more so than I was three years ago, when I wrote that the BSA’s stand against homosexuality and its ongoing battle with the Unitarian Universalist Association (my denomination) might compel me to drop out and take my son with me (see "On My Honor," News, July 31, 1998). The reason is simple. The basic decency of the members, and the outside world’s righteous anger, are slowly forcing the leadership to change its ways.
THE COVER story in Newsweek’s August 6 issue showed just how untenable discrimination has gotten. The magazine reported that, according to the BSA’s own internal polls, 30 percent of Scouts’ parents oppose the anti-gay policy — a percentage you can be sure is skewed much higher here in the liberal, secular Northeast than in the Bible Belt. And at a time when other youth groups are booming, Newsweek reported, membership in the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts dropped by 4.5 percent last year — and 7.8 percent in the Northeast.
Such symptoms could be seen as signposts of an out-of-touch organization’s slow death. Fortunately, though the Texas rednecks remain unmoved, others within the BSA are starting to act. In June, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson reported that nine of the largest councils in the country — including Greater Boston’s Minuteman Council — were pressing Texas to allow institutions that sponsor local Scout groups (schools, churches, and the like) to set their own policies on discrimination. In many ways, this would seem like an ideal solution: a troop sponsored by a Catholic church would presumably keep the gay ban in place, whereas a troop sponsored by a school parents’ group or, say, a Reform temple would be free to welcome gay scoutmasters and boys.
Then, last week, the Minuteman Council took it a giant step further by approving a new bylaw that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. "Discussions about sexual orientation do not have a place in Scouts," council executive Brock Bigsby told the Globe. "The Scouts will not inquire into a person’s sexual history and that person will not expose their sexual orientation one way or the other."
Some have interpreted this as a lame version of Bill Clinton’s infamous "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy. A peeved Andrew Sullivan, in his weblog (www.andrewsullivan.com), wrote, "Good idea. Now let’s make sure no-one talks about sexual orientation — straights included. No mention of wives or girlfriends or children; no mention that they are heterosexual in any way." But I don’t think Sullivan is giving the Minuteman Council enough credit. As I read it, the council is being deliberately ambiguous about what is and what isn’t acceptable. Obviously a gay scoutmaster isn’t going to be allowed to talk about what he and his partner did in bed last weekend; but a straight scoutmaster can’t discuss what positions he and his wife like, either. So can a gay scoutmaster talk about what restaurant he and his partner went to last weekend? I don’t see why not. The point should be that Scout leaders can’t talk to their young charges about sex, not that they can’t talk about their lives. We’ll see.
The Minuteman compromise seems especially promising because it suggests a way out of the squeeze that the BSA finds itself in. On the one hand, it’s under enormous pressure from mainstream society to stop discriminating. From Miami to Washington, from Chicago to Minneapolis, from Rhode Island to California, outraged communities are cutting off funding for Scout programs, banning them from public facilities, and denouncing their anti-gay politics. On the other hand, both the Mormon and, to a lesser extent, Catholic churches have a stranglehold on the organization, and have threatened to pull out (and take their money with them) if the BSA relaxes its discriminatory stance (see "Holy War," News and Features, September 15, 2000).
The only solution is decentralization and local control. Yes, it would be nice to squash discrimination everywhere, but surely it’s better to chip away at it than to stand back and accomplish nothing. And let’s not lose sight of how far we’ve come. In one generation, the Scouts’ anti-gay policy has gone from something so normal and unremarkable that no one even talked about it to the single biggest issue facing the organization. That’s actually progress of a sort.
There’s another point that needs to be made. Internally, on a day-to-day basis, the Scouts’ anti-gay policy is a non-issue. If the discriminatory policy is dropped, gay Scout leaders are not going to suddenly materialize and announce, "I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m taking your sons camping this weekend whether you like it or not." Scout leaders become leaders because other adults trust them. Unlike the rednecks in Texas, they are not self-appointed. A gay man could not become the scoutmaster of a troop without passing muster with parents, troop committee members, and, ultimately, the boys themselves. In the end, what’s most offensive about the policy is that it runs roughshod over what the community wants.
Let’s face it. At the root of the anti-gay policy is the anachronistic fear that homosexuals prey on boys. Yet an out gay man is a highly unlikely candidate to be a pedophile. Invariably, sexual predators turn out to be heterosexuals, or men who pose as heterosexuals, such as Christopher Reardon, a married man who recently pleaded guilty to sexually abusing boys at a church where he worked, a YMCA, and, yes, a Boy Scout camp. In their zeal to protect kids (and to promote their own exclusionary morality), Scouting officials have targeted for elimination the very people the organization needs, while doing nothing to deal with the real problem of pedophilic youth leaders.
ONE NIGHT last winter, two other adult Scout leaders and I were setting up the track for the next day’s Pinewood Derby. One, whom I’ll call Gary, is the leader of our Webelos patrol and a good friend. His son and my son are close. He also happens to be a fundamentalist and a staunch supporter of the anti-gay policy. The other, whom I’ll call Ken, is liberal, secular, and an opponent of discrimination.
After the track was set up, Gary pulled out a 12-pack of beer (he belongs to a non-abstaining branch of fundamentalism) and the three of us began talking about the state of the world. Ken and I ganged up on Gary, telling him that there was nothing wrong with gays in Scouting, and that the BSA’s backward policies would eventually destroy the organization. Indeed, we were meeting in a Congregational church hall — the very sort of organization that might someday throw the Scouts out if they don’t change. (Of course, church officials might also throw us out if they knew we were drinking beer on church property, but that’s another matter.) Gary didn’t back down. But my point is that Scouting is far from the monolithic gang of uniformed, jackbooted homophobes that it may appear to outsiders.
This week, Gary and I and our sons are going hiking in the White Mountains. We’ll sit around a campfire and talk about religion, politics, history, and, of course, Scouting. We agree about almost nothing. Yet in some essential way we share the same values.
Does it make me a bad person if I tell you that Gary is a good person? I don’t think it’s that simple. As Stuart Taylor wrote in National Journal last fall, "liberals ... should remember that gay rights did not become fashionable even in their own circles until the past 30 years or so." I grew up in a mildly homophobic environment, and it wasn’t until I had reached my early 20s that I shook it off. We shouldn’t tolerate intolerance; but we also shouldn’t forget that homophobia has far more to do with conditioning, culture, and social class than it does with innate evil.
In a sense, I felt sorry for the Scouts I saw in Washington. When I was a Scout, there was no larger meaning attached to it. We camped, we hiked, we gained an appreciation and love for nature, and, most important, we learned teamwork and how to make our way in a world that wasn’t especially welcoming toward geeky adolescents who wore even geekier uniforms and weren’t especially good at sports. Today, Scouts are cast as cultural warriors whether they like it or not. It’s unfair, and it marginalizes a movement that has changed millions of boys’ lives for the better.
But that doesn’t mean that the BSA deserves a free pass. Far from it. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, the pressure brought to bear by the outside world has done much to start Scouting on the road to the tolerant present. In a sense, we should all be grateful that the Court ruled as it did. Rather than overturning the gay ban and thus transforming Scouting into a martyr for the religious right, the Court allowed the Texas rednecks who’ve taken over the organization to strut around in all their homophobic glory. And mainstream America was appalled.
As the actions of the Minuteman Council suggest, Scouting will survive only if it can adapt, and it can adapt only if local leaders are able to free themselves from the intolerant policies of the national office. Over the past few years, Texas has actually booted out individual troops that refused to toe the homophobic line. But it can’t boot out an entire region of the country without destroying itself.
Scouting isn’t going to change overnight, and it’s not going to change everywhere at once. But it’s changing — enough so that I’ve gone from worrying that I would have to pull my son out to hoping he’ll stick with it.
As for Gary — well, I’ll keep working on him.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
