NEW YORK — There were dire warnings for the Boy Scouts of America a year ago when the group’s leaders, under intense pressure, voted to end a long-standing blanket ban on participation by openly gay adults. Several of the biggest
NEW YORK — There were dire warnings for the Boy Scouts of America a year ago when the group’s leaders, under intense pressure, voted to end a long-standing blanket ban on participation by openly gay adults. Several of the biggest sponsors of Scout units, including the Roman Catholic, Mormon and Southern Baptist churches, were openly dismayed, raising the prospect of mass defections.
Remarkably, nearly 12 months after the BSA National Executive Board’s decision, the Boy Scouts seem more robust than they have in many years. Youth membership is on the verge of stabilizing after a prolonged decline, corporations which halted donations because of the ban have resumed their support, and the vast majority of units affiliated with conservative religious denominations have remained in the fold — still free to exclude gay adults if that’s in accordance with their religious doctrine.
Catholic Bishop Robert Guglielmone of Charleston, South Carolina, whose duties include liaising with the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, says he knows of no instances where a Catholic unit — there are more than 7,500 — has taken on an openly gay adult leader since the policy change. Gay sex and same-sex marriage are considered violations of church teaching.
The Boy Scouts’ national leadership “has been wonderfully supportive,” Guglielmone said.
Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., were unhappy with the BSA’s easing of the ban on gay adults, but did not call on individual churches to disaffiliate with troops that they sponsored.
A year later, the number of Southern Baptist churches that did cut ties with Scouting is “in the double digits,” far outnumbered by those who continued their sponsorships, according to Ted S. Spangenberg Jr., president of the executive board of the Association of Baptists for Scouting.
“A few of the churches that left are starting to trickle back as the knee-jerk reaction is over,” Spangenberg said. “We kind of like the way it looks — if you’re faith-based, it’s within your right to select the adult leaders who are going to uphold the tenets of your faith.”
Spangenberg spoke by phone from a Boy Scout camp in Defuniak Springs, Florida, where he was serving as chaplain and all-terrain vehicle instructor.
Another leader pleased with the developments is Richard Mason, president of the BSA’s Greater New York Councils, which serves nearly 50,000 youths in the New York City area.
In April 2015, the NY Councils played a key role in the BSA policy change, defying the ban by announcing the hiring of an 18-year-old gay Eagle Scout to work at one of its summer camps. Soon afterward, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office opened an inquiry into the BSA’s membership policies and influence over local councils’ hiring decisions.
Mason said the aftermath of the policy change has been overwhelmingly positive in New York. Some corporations and liberal religious groups that cut ties with the Scouts because of the ban have restored them, he said, while the Catholic archdiocese — initially wary of the change — has remained fully active with scouting.
The changes in BSA policy toward gay youths and adult leaders were “handled as professionally as I have seen any contentious issue handled during my career,” said Mason, a lawyer experienced with complex bankruptcy proceedings.
Until last year, the Boy Scouts had explicitly adhered to a ban on gay adults for more than three decades, even taking a case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, when it won a 5-4 decision upholding its right to have exclusionary membership policies.
