Any questions?

I will agree with them on one thing, though — the Boy Scouts should not be dealing with issues of sexuality. They’re obviously not equipped to handle those questions rationally.

And lesbians are allowed to be Girl Guides in the US.

I was at Dublin Pride recently, and there was a guy there in his scout uniform with a rainbow scarf. He said it was the standard uniform of the LGBT chapter of the British Scouts.

The USA has some catching up to do.

TRiG.

From the perspective of someone who’s an Eagle Scout, lapsed Order of the Arrow (the BSA honor-society) member, and comes from a long-tradition of scouting, grand-dad was the same, this policy is significantly more reprehensible than you’ve managed to state. In short: its explicit religious discrimination. If your religion is neutral, eg bhuddist, or LGBT-affirming, eg the MCC, the BSA will subsitute it’s own judgment for that of your church.

The policy is, as far as I have been able to find:

“Boy Scouts of America believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed. The conduct of youth members must be in compliance with the Scout Oath and Law, and membership in Boy Scouts of America is contingent upon the willingness to accept Scouting’s values and beliefs. Most boys join Scouting when they are 10 or 11 years old. As they continue in the program, all Scouts are expected to take leadership positions. In the unlikely event that an older boy were to hold himself out as homosexual, he would not be able to continue in a youth leadership position.”[1]

Some background:

The BSA talks a lot about three over-arching duties in life, in order:
1) Duty to God
2) Duty to Country
3) Duty to Self

It was made very clear, during my time in the BSA, that being “morally straight” and “clean in thought, word, and deed” are primarily part of our duty to God. More over it was made clear that the standard for evaluating any persons fulfillment of their duty to God was purely the purview of that person’s church.

A concrete example of how this is /supposed to work/ from my childhood, with names changed to protect the not-so-innocent, went something like this:

A boy, let’s call him Timmy Johnson, got caught drinking beer at a non-scout related event. The scout master, Mr Clayburn, a good mormon man attempted to unilaterally kick Timmy out of the troop. Mr Johnson of course objected stating that it wasnt Mr Clayburn’s place to do such a thing. The troop parents comittee agreed, but couldnt decide if the drinking qualified as immoral and wrote the local Catholic parish where the Johnsons attended. Father Flannery, being a good Irish Catholic, replyed that there was nothing inherently immoral about the consumption of alcohol, that “boys will be boys”. Thus Timmy was allowed to remain in the troop and Mr Clayburn resigned in a huff and moved his son to another troop.

This basic process for resolving important issues of morality is used daily all across the country except for cases when the subject is homosexuality. The petition that Zach Wahls delivered to the BSA asked them to use the standard process by shifting dicisions about the morality of homosexuality down to the troop level where such decisions belong.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100206191637/http://www.bsalegal.org/morally-straight-cases-225.asp (since removed)

Wow! That sounds like something I might have wrote – quelle surprise.