Boy Scouts committee approves gay leaders, sets national vote

The executive committee of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has unanimously approved a resolution to allow openly homosexual men to be leaders of Scouts as young as 7 years old.

Units sponsored by churches opposed to the change could maintain the ban on homosexual leaders if they choose. But John Stemberger—who led opposition to changes in the BSA membership policies before leaving the Scouts to help form Trail Life USA, a Christian Scouting alternative—said the “local option” provides little protection for churches, Scout units opposed to the change, or the boys themselves.

“Forty to 50 percent of Scouting is collective,” he said. “From district and council events such as camporees and summer camps, to national jamborees, to the Order of the Arrow, to high adventure bases such as Philmont—it will be impossible for a local unit to insulate itself from this change.”

In a statement Monday, the BSA said the 17-member executive committee approved the resolution on Friday and noted it would become official policy immediately if ratified by the organization’s 80-member National Executive Board at a meeting on July 27.

Stemberger criticized both the process and the outcome.

“In 2013, when the BSA made the decision to allow gay Scouts, the local option was rejected,” he said. “The leadership said there needed to be a single national membership standard. So there’s a credibility issue here.”

Stemberger also said the change came with no input from rank-and-file Scout leadership: “It was a top-down decision.”

But Friday’s executive committee decision was not a surprise. In May the BSA’s president, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said the ban on openly homosexual adults was no longer sustainable. He and other BSA leaders said the ban likely would be the target of lawsuits the Scouts would lose.

Even opponents of openly homosexual leaders agree with that assessment. That was part of the argument Stemberger made in 2013 when the BSA began allowing openly gay boys to participate.

“Allowing gay boys and not gay leaders was never a sustainable or even a principled solution,” Stemberger said. “It was purely a pragmatic decision. That’s one of the most discouraging things about how this has been handled. It would be one thing if Gates was making the decision based on some sort of appeal to human rights or equality. But one of the ironies is that an organization founded to teach character and principled leadership is making these decisions for purely pragmatic reasons.”

In a memo sent Monday to local Scout officials nationwide, the BSA’s top leaders said they had consulted their religious partners before acting on the resolution, and they pledged to defend the right of any church-sponsored units to continue excluding gay adults from leadership posts.

But even this weak protection for religious groups is too much for gay activists.

“Half measures are unacceptable and discriminatory exemptions [for religious groups] have no place in the Boy Scouts,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “It’s long overdue that BSA leaders demonstrate true leadership and embrace a full national policy of inclusion.”

The BSA’s recent steps toward “inclusion” have had the effect not of inclusion, but of exclusion. According to its 2014 annual report, membership has fallen to 2.3 million—a drop of nearly 14 percent in just two years. According to the BSA’s Form 990s for 2012 and 2013 (the last two years available), the organization has lost more than $80 million during that two-year period.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest protestant denomination, passed a proclamation in 2014 that encourages its churches to look for alternatives to BSA. TrailLife USA, organized in 2013, now has about 570 troops in 48 states, with 23,000 members, according to Mark Hancock, the group’s president.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.