Can A Scout Be Gay?

ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN--CORBIS SYGMA FOR TIME
Cozza likes the Scout uniform but not Scout values

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Yikes! thought the Scout councilmen, who revoked his Scout membership. When Dale asked for an explanation, they said the Boy Scouts of America "specifically forbid membership to homosexuals." Angry and sad--Dale had hoped to be a scoutmaster after college--he brought his case to the main gay legal organization, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which sued. Then in 1991 Dale gained solid legal footing when the New Jersey legislature, in an unrelated move, added gays to the state's Law Against Discrimination.

Today the crux of the Scouts' case against Dale is that he is a "gay-rights activist" who won't be able to "communicate scouting's moral values." In fact, it's difficult to imagine Dale sleeping in a tent at all these days, much less inveighing against gays around a campfire. Last summer, before his lawyers made him stop talking to reporters on the record, Dale joked with one that he was happy not to have to wear the uniform, "a cotton-poly blend." He lives in lower Manhattan and works as ad director of POZ, a magazine about AIDS. He has dabbled in modeling and appeared in January 1999 among the "OUT 100," a list of influential people compiled by a gay magazine.

But if it is hard to imagine Dale's spreading the word that gay is bad, his attorney, Evan Wolfson, says the Boy Scouts rarely convey that message themselves. He says the Scouts have never taken a position on homosexuality outside a court case. "The anti-gay view is never communicated to any member," Wolfson says. "The freedom of association turns on what brings members together. And scouting is not about bigotry." (Interestingly, the Girl Scouts have an antidiscrimination policy that is understood to forbid bias against lesbians--though Girl Scout leaders aren't supposed to display their sexuality in any way.)

Boy Scouts attorney George Davidson protests that their anti-gay position is "hardly under a rock," but he admits that if you check out , read the Boy Scout Handbook or go with your son to a troop meeting, you'll hear nothing about gays. He also acknowledges that, perversely, if they were more stridently anti-gay--if they were the Boy Scouts of the K.K.K.--they would have a clearer First Amendment claim that admitting gays would destroy everything they stand for. "Look, if this were a business, the Boy Scouts would simply put a few lines [of anti-gay rhetoric] in a corporate handbook and be done with it," says Davidson, who usually defends major businesses.

So why not? Because the Boy Scouts are torn between competing sides in the culture wars. One faction is composed of such sponsoring institutions as schools and fire departments--more and more of which have policies that prohibit discrimination against gays. Also part of this faction are liberal religious groups that have filed a brief on behalf of Dale, including committees from the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Together members of this faction sponsor some 22,000 Scout units (roughly 20% of the total). If the Scouts became a fiercely anti-gay group, many churches and schools would quickly drop them. That's why the Scout oath is so mushy, requiring its takers to be "morally straight," a term devised a century ago, before the word "straight" had a sexual implication. Today, however, it is the term to which scouting officials must point when asked for a statement of their views on gays.

For some, the Scouts have already gone too far in being anti-gay. The city of Chicago has battled the Scouts for more than four years. Its Commission on Human Relations ruled in 1996 that the Scouts broke a city ordinance when they barred former eagle scout Keith Richardson from applying for a job because he is gay. The next year the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued Chicago itself for sponsoring 28 troops of Explorers, a career-oriented Boy Scouts program for older youth. It was the first time a chartering institution, rather than the Scouts, had been sued. In 1998, the city relented and withdrew its sponsorship.

But the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Irving, Texas, is controlled by another faction in the debate, those for whom "morally straight" definitely means sexually straight. In recent years, members of the Mormon church have become a powerful force within scouting. Today nearly 10% of the members of the Boy Scouts Advisory Council live in Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Latter-day Saints constitute less than 2% of the U.S. population but 21% of the boys in the core Boy Scouts program, more than any other group.

The Latter-day Saints have been instrumental in helping defeat pro-gay initiatives in at least three states. In 1995 Jack Goaslind Jr., a prominent church member who currently sits on the Scouts advisory council, said the church "would withdraw our charter membership" if scouting were required to admit gays. Moreover, in the Dale case, most major conservative groups in the U.S., from the Family Research Council to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, have sided with the Scouts.