The end of the Boy Scouts

Boy Scouts of America (BSA) president and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Scouts’ annual national meeting last week that the 105-year old organization’s exclusion of homosexuals from adult leadership is “an unsustainable position.” He was not advocating gay-inclusion morally. He is watching the rapid-paced social and legal trends and anticipating lawsuits. He is recognizing that “We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”

The solution Gates suggests is to leave the gay staffing and volunteer decision to local “unit sponsoring organizations,” 70 percent of which are churches. Perhaps this way, much of Scouting can survive.

Scouting is not just about camping. It’s character formation, growing from boyhood into manhood under manly supervision and examples. Admitting openly homosexual men into troop leadership confuses and even precludes the very notion of manhood.

In Canada, scouting has nothing to do with boys growing to be men. The Canadian Scouts went fully co-ed in 1998, though there is still a separate organization for girls, the Girl Guides. Thus, the website refers to “youth,” not “boys,” and in 2007 it changed its name from Boy Scouts of Canada to just “Scouts Canada.” In 1999, it formed the first all-gay Scout Troop without any public controversy. Homosexuals in membership and leadership seem never to have been an issue there.

So it is not surprising that the Canadian Scouts state their moral purpose much more vaguely than their American counterparts do. The BSA mission is to equip members “to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes.” Their vision is to prepare each Scout “to become a responsible, participating citizen and leader.” This all refers to the specific moral content of the Scout Law: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

Scouts Canada seeks merely to develop “well rounded youth” for “success,” especially in “making a better world.” They have neither law nor oath, but merely three “values”: duty to God that needs not involve a God, duty to others so vacantly broad as to include “respect for the dignity of one’s fellow-beings,” and duty to develop oneself “to one’s full potential physically, intellectually, spiritually and socially.”

Today’s BSA is what happens when a Christian organization is so successful that it gains broad appeal among non-Christians who then feel entitled to its services on their terms and even to lead it, as though it were a public utility. This happened despite the Boy Scouts being quite clear on its principles.

Trail Life USA hopes to be more faithful, as though that will be easy. It began in 2013 after the BSA’s decision to admit openly homosexual Scouts. But Trail Life is small (23,000 members compared to the 2.4 million Scouts), so no one is bothering its organizers right now. But it is only a matter of time before they find themselves boxed in with the Boy Scouts.