In 2008 I earned the rank of Eagle Scout as a member of Troop 51 in Fayetteville, New York. I have bragged about this in the past, but this is not bragging--I simply want to put my viewpoint in context.
On Monday, the Boy Scouts of America revoked the charter of a Seattle Boy Scout troop who stood behind their openly gay Scoutmaster. This was in keeping with a longstanding BSA rule refusing the leadership of "open or avowed" homosexual men. The BSA only recently acted to allow openly gay youths in Boy Scout troops, with that decree coming last May via a vote from the BSA's national council.
I will put this as plainly as I know how: The Boy Scouts of America, by holding onto this policy, are committing a moral and social wrong. Their ban on gay leaders within the Scouts reflects the ignorance borne of an outdated understanding of what homosexuality is and who homosexuals are.
The official policy of the BSA, as of 2004, reads as follows: "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." This revision, while still ethically disastrous, was changed from the 1993 resolution, which stated that "homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirement...that a Scout be morally straight and...that a Scout be clean in word and deed...homosexuals do not provide a desirable role model for Scouts."
The BSA is making the problematic choice to espouse the belief that being sexually straight is akin to being morally straight. And by doing so, they are doing an untold number of their members a great disservice.
What are scouts who are struggling with their own sexualities, their own identities, to make of this? Boys who might love every moment they've spent with their troop, love all the new skills they've learned and the sense of community they've gained, essentially being told that when they grow up they will be unfit to lead, because of who they might love? Or boys who happen to have gay fathers, unable to understand why their dad wasn't invited on the camping trip when everyone else's was?
Look. I understand that joining the Boy Scouts, either as a boy or as an adult leader, is a choice. No one can make you, and there are those who would say that if a gay leader didn't want to be removed from his position, he never should have joined an organization that was so contrary to his own principles in the first place. But (at the risk of building a straw man here) I would be willing to bet that most people who would say that have never spent any great length of time inside a Boy Scout troop.
I refer back to my own experience as a scout, which spanned from 1998 to 2008. In Cub Scout Pack 153 and BSA Troop 51 I interacted with and served the community alongside boys and leaders from all walks of life. This included a number of scouts who were "open and avowed homosexuals" (to borrow the BSA's own troublesome phrase), as well as some who were neither open nor avowed but weren't heterosexual, either. Young boys are shitty to one another for any number of reasons, but in my memories of Troop 51 no one was outwardly shitty to anyone else strictly because of their sexual preference. In the ways that counted, we were by and large a very open, if strange and occasionally lazy, bunch.
It is in this way that individual Boy Scout troops, and individual Boy Scouts, are a far cry from what the BSA claims to be as a whole. Troop 51 harbored its fair share of gay scouts during my time in it, as well as a number of atheists and agnostics (both of which also fall in the "unacceptable" category as far as BSA is concerned). And in a twist that will hopefully surprise no one, there were good and bad gay scouts. There were good and bad agnostic scouts. There were good and bad hetero scouts. There were good and bad rigidly Christian scouts. It was, frankly, an awful lot like real life.
One of the things Boy Scouts are required to learn is the Scout Law, which lists the twelve characteristics that all scouts must have. They are as follows: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. The idea is that these twelve points are all equally valuable and important in the life of a scout.
I suspect I, like many, struggled hardest with the law of "obedience". What I've learned as I've grown older is that obedience is only valuable when it's reflected upon--we should stay accountable and obedient to those we trust and respect, but blindly obeying orders is not exactly healthy behavior. By stripping Troop 98 of its charter, the BSA has made that most troublesome of scout laws, being obedient, more valuable than my personal favorite scout law, being loyal. These scouts, as well as the Reverend Monica Corsaro, stayed loyal to a man who they believed was a good man and a good leader. They stayed loyal to their principles at the expense of remaining obedient to a faceless superior.
In doing so, these boys ascribed to a much higher "standard of manhood" than that passed down by the BSA's ruling council. The troop as a whole, including Rev. Corsaro, displayed their open minds and open hearts and received a national rebuke. The BSA is allowing each of them to join up with other troops, but that seems like so much wishful thinking on the council's part--who would want to continue on in such an institution? An institution that upbraids and degrades those people who don't fit the narrow, outdated ideal of what it means "to be a man"?
I will always be proud to be an Eagle Scout, because I know what I've accomplished and I know the years of work it took to attain Scouting's highest honor. But as long as this foolish, archaic policy remains in place, I will find it impossible to be proud of the Boy Scouts of America.
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