Boy Scouts Of America Votes To Lift Ban On Gay Scouts
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) - In one of their most dramatic choices in a century, local leaders of the Boy Scouts of America's National Council voted Thursday to ease a divisive ban allowing openly gay boys to be accepted into the nation's leading youth organization.
The resolution allows gay scouts. Whether to allow gay scout leaders was not up for consideration.
"The future of scouting is absolutely at stake with this issue," said Zach Wahls, an Eagle Scout and the founder of Scouts for Equality, ahead of the vote. "If the ban stays in place, the bigger problem is going to be the number of people who don't come to the program."
Boy Scouts Of America Votes To Lift Ban On Gay Scouts
The change will take effect on Jan. 1, 2014. Following the vote, the Boy Scouts of America released a statement, reading in part:
"While people have different opinions about this policy, we can all agree that kids are better off when they are in Scouting. Going forward, our Scouting family will continue to focus on reaching and serving youth in order to help them grow into good, strong citizens. America's youth need Scouting, and by focusing on the goals that unite us, we can continue to accomplish incredible things for young people and the communities we serve."
The statement added there are no plans for further review on this highly divisive issue.
"Seven thousand Eagle Scout members of Scouts for Equality remain committed towards full inclusion for youths and parents," Wahls told WCBS 880's Peter Haskell. "So, we support this resolution as a means to getting towards full inclusion for all youth and parents."
Wahls is straight but his parents are gay.
Ahead of the vote, supporters of the ban on gays in the scouts said altering the policy would lead religious-based sponsors to walk away. But Wahls said he doesn't buy that argument.
"Every single other sponsor, from the Mormon church to the Catholic church, has either endorsed the policy change like the Mormons or has not really taken a position like the Catholics," Wahls told Haskell.
Ahead of Thursday's vote, five of New Jersey's six scouting councils urged passage of the proposal.
Casting ballots were about 1,400 voting members of BSA's National Council who were attending their annual meeting at a conference center not far from BSA headquarters in suburban Dallas.
More liberal Scout leaders - while supporting the proposal to accept gay youth - have made clear they want the ban on gay adults lifted as well. If the full no-gays policy is maintained, some units in liberal areas may consider either leaving the Scouts or openly defying the ban.
Many Scout units in conservative areas feared their local donors will stop giving if the ban on gay youth is lifted, while many major corporate donors are likely to withhold donations if the ban had remained.
In January, the BSA executive committee suggested a plan to give sponsors of local Scout units the option of admitting gays as both youth members and adult leaders or continuing to exclude them. However, the plan won little praise, and the BSA changed course after assessing responses to surveys sent out starting in February to members of the Scouting community.
Of the more than 200,000 leaders, parents and youth members who responded, 61 percent supported the current policy of excluding gays, while 34 percent opposed it. However, most parents of young Scouts, as while as youth members themselves, opposed the ban.
In the weeks leading up to the vote, and on Wednesday as National Council members arrived in Grapevine, Texas, advocacy groups on both sides of the debate organized news conferences, photo opportunities and forums to make their case.
Two conservative groups opposed to any easing of the ban - the Family Research Council and OnMyHonor.net - placed an ad Thursday in the Dallas Morning News warning that lifting the ban on gay youth would trigger lawsuits that could force the BSA to admit gay adults as well as youth. It said lifting the ban on gay boys could drive out as many as 400,000 of the Scouts' youth members.
The BSA's overall "traditional youth membership'' - Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Venturers - is now about 2.6 million, compared with more than 4 million in peak years of the past. It also has about 1 million adult leaders and volunteers.
Of the more than 100,000 Scouting units in the U.S., 70 percent are chartered by religious institutions. Those include liberal churches opposed to any ban on gays, but some of the largest sponsors are relatively conservative denominations that have previously supported the broad ban - notably the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Southern Baptist churches.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced in April that it was satisfied with new proposal, and the National Catholic Committee on Scouting has not opposed it.
However, 50 leaders of other conservative religious groups have issued a statement imploring the National Council to retain the full ban, warning that easing it "would open the Scouts to a wide range of open sexual expressions.''
The signatories included the leaders of the Assemblies of God, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
The BSA, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2010, has long excluded both gays and atheists.
Protests over the no-gays policy gained momentum in 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the BSA's right to exclude gays. Scout units lost sponsorships by public schools and other entities that adhered to nondiscrimination policies, and several local Scout councils made public their displeasure with the policy.
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