The Boy Scouts of America's 71
-member board voted Monday to approve a resolution that lifts the organization-wide ban on gay adult leaders. Individual scout units will be able to set their own policies regarding whether to allow gay men to lead scout troops.
The vote followed an impassioned plea in May by the Boy Scouts President Robert Gates, a former U.S. defense secretary, who told the group, "We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be." Gates, an Eagle Scout, told leaders, "The status quo in our movement's membership standards cannot be sustained."
But the new policy won't prevent church-led scout groups from choosing adult leaders "whose beliefs are consistent with their own," the group said.
The Scouts' 17-member executive committee earlier this month unanimously approved a resolution to end a blanket ban on gay adult leaders and let individual scout units set their own policy on the long-divisive issue. With Monday's vote, the change becomes official policy, effective immediately.
The Scouts' ban on gay adults saw its first major challenge last April, when the first openly gay adult was hired as a summer camp leader by the Greater New York Council of Boy Scouts. Attorney David Boies, who fought California's Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage, had threatened to sue the Boy Scouts if it tried to bar the hiring. Boies said ……..
Zach Wahls, 24, an Eagle Scout and executive director of Scouts for Equality, which has pushed for the new policy, said Monday's vote "marks the beginning of a new chapter" for the Boy Scouts. "As of this vote, the Boy Scouts of America is an organization that is looking forward, not back."
The organization has been slowly, steadily, moving toward this moment. In 2013, it allowed openly gay youth to be scouts, but stopped short of allowing gay adults to be leaders. Gates, who became the organization's national president in May 2014, said at the time that he personally would have favored ending the ban, but that he opposed debating it after the Scouts' policy-making body upheld it. But in May 2015, at the Boy Scouts' annual meeting, he said events of the past year "have confronted us with urgent challenges I did not foresee and which we cannot ignore."
Gates said those included growing challenges to the policy in New York and Colorado, as well as new state laws and court decisions barring discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Boy Scouts, he said, "finds itself in an unsustainable position" regarding the ban.
While revoking charters of councils that allowed gay leaders would be allowed under the current policy, he said, "such an action would deny the lifelong benefits of scouting to hundreds of thousands of boys and young men today and vastly more in the future. I will not take that path."
He cited an announcement by the BSA's New York City chapter in early April that it had hired a summer camp leader, Pascal Tessier, who was the first openly gay American to become an Eagle Scout, the highest rank. Gates also cited broader developments related to gay rights, and warned that rigidly maintaining the ban "will be the end of us as a national movement."
Mark Goldfeder, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law, said
