Critics See Hypocrisy In Anti-Gay Scouting Groups Will Work To Deny Public Funding To Scouts

A U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the Boy Scouts of America to bar homosexual troop leaders from the organization will force young men into an impossible predicament, critics of the ruling say.

“Gay youths are put in a Catch-22 situation,” said Jon Davidson, supervising attorney in the Los Angeles office of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. “They are told by the Scouts to be open and honest and, yet, if they are, they are told they will be kicked out.”

Lambda is the gay rights organization that represented James Dale, the homosexual Scout leader in New Jersey who was removed from his position in the case before the high court.

“It tells gay youths that if they want to be Scouts, they have to disobey the requirement to be morally straight,” Davidson said of Wednesday’s ruling.

In the case known as Dale vs. Boy Scouts of America, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 ruling that as a private organization, the Scouts could make their own rules about membership.

While it does not specifically address the matter of young gay Scouts, some believe the decision could be interpreted as allowing the Scouts to keep homosexuals out of the group.

“Boy Scout policy says no known or avowed homosexual may be a member of scouting,” Davidson said. “It doesn’t distinguish between leaders or youth members. The decision does not appear to rest on the fact that James Dale is a scouting leader. It might be the case that the same result would apply in the exclusion of someone who is just a member.”

Others belonging to gay rights groups are blasting the decision and vowing to fight taxpayer funding of the organization.

“The Boy Scouts have basically become the KKK of youth organizations by saying they will not allow some people in because they are different,” said Pete King, president of East Bay Pride in Northern California. “They can be sure that we will be out in the cities and in the counties making sure they get no public assistance ever again.”

Some maintain that public agencies and government entities who are tied to the Scouts should wash their hands of any affiliation with the group. Further, the Scouts could lose public assistance in cities that adhere to anti-discrimination policies, including San Francisco.

“San Francisco already does not allow the Scouts to recruit in schools or to sponsor them,” Davidson said. “But other cities in California have public agencies … that still sponsor troops.

“The Supreme Court accepted their argument that they are a discriminatory, exclusionary organization. That should present a serious problem for government entities - there are fire departments, military units, public schools that sponsor the Scouts, that run the troops. They would be participating in discrimination.”

While many hailed the ruling because it allows private organizations to set their own moral course, gay rights supporters condemn it as a sanction of discrimination.

“It’s a victory for bigotry and discrimination,” said Scott Cozza, 47, a social worker at San Francisco General Hospital and a former Scoutmaster, with his son, has formed a protest organization called Scouting for All. “Human rights in America has lost.”

The nation’s highest court said Wednesday that forcing the 90-year-old Scouting organization to accept homosexual troop leaders would violate the organization’s rights of free expression and free association under the Constitution’s First Amendment.

“The Boy Scouts asserts that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the values it seeks to instill,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the court.

To require the Scouts to accept a gay Scoutmaster “would significantly burden the organization’s right to oppose or disfavor homosexual conduct.”