This week, the leaders of The
Boys Scouts of America (BSA) are meeting to revisit the group’s ban
on allowing gays to participate as scouts and leaders. BSA is
widely expected to vote to allow the individual chartering
organizations that sponsor troops to make their own decision on the
matter. Most observers expect many troops to allow gays and others,
especially those linked to conservative churches, to maintain the
ban.

As Reason 24/7 News (your
indispensable source for breaking news all day long)
points out, President Barack Obama has said he thinks the
Scouts should allow gays full participation. Incumbent presidents
have long been the honorary head of the organization, so his
repsonse in a pre-Super Bowl interview is not just routine
skylarking (though there’s some of that in it, to be sure). Gov.
Rick Perry (R-Texas), who is an Eagle Scout,
has repeatedly said that the ban should stay.

As an Eagle Scout who chose not to let my own sons participate
in scouts due to its longstanding policy of exclusion, I agree with
the president.

The controversy on the matter was the subject of a piece I wrote
that appears in the weekend edition of
the Wall Street Journal:

I still draw on what I learned in the Scouts, whose mission
statement talks about preparing “young people to make ethical and
moral choices over their lifetimes.” That creed has helped to make
me a better father—or at least a less-bad one—to my two sons, whom
I kept from joining the Boy Scouts because of the group’s position
on gays.

It was a decision that I made with much sadness and not a little
anger, but it was fully in keeping with the Scout Oath, which
requires members to do their best to be “morally straight” at all
times and to do what they think is right.

Read more here. And read Reason comment thread
on the piece here.

At the same time, even though I disagree about BSA’s policy,
it’s worth keeping in mind that as a private organization, the
group should have every right to set and enforce any membership
policy they want. Voluntary association is a hugely important
principle to maintain, especially in a society where we all have
different ideas of how best to live our lives. In fact,
BSA’s right was upheld (correctly) by the
Supreme Court in 2000 over the very issue of
gays.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that the organization has
been paying a price for their retrograde policy whose basic error
stems from confusing homosexuals with child molesters and perverts.
That confusion is rooted in longstanding homophobia that is not
only mistaken but somehow prevented the Boy Scouts from policing
actual cases of child molesting that occurred under its aegis.
Most, if not all, of the problems the group covered up
for decades involved married men who preyed on
children. Child molesters are child molesters, and it’s a different
issue than sexual orientation. I think if the Scouts openly allow
gays to join and lead, the organization can only become more
transparent in the ways it operates and, ultimately, better at
protecting the boys it serves. And it may win back some of the
support it has lost from companies
such as UPS, which stopped giving it money due to the
policy on gays. 

The Boy Scouts have been in
a decades-long decline in terms of numbers and influence in
American life for many reasons: It developed in a very different
America and, like many social organizations that gained prominence
before World War II, its relevance has waned as the United States
has become more modern, more mobile, less gender-biased, and more.
It’s not clear that allowing gays to join openly at
least some troops will do much to slow that decline – and if the
opt-in/opt-out revision goes through, it’s far from the sort of
clear signal that group might send that it’s moving into the 21st
century. But it’s still an improvement over the
current policy.