Boy Scouts president says ban on gay adults not sustainable

The national president of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), Robert Gates, said Thursday that the organization's long-standing ban on participation by openly gay adults is no longer sustainable and called for change in order to avert potentially destructive legal battles.

In a speech in Atlanta to the Scouts' national annual meeting, he referred to recent moves by Scout councils in New York City and elsewhere to defy the ban. "The status quo in our movement's membership standards cannot be sustained," he said.

Gates, a former U.S. defense secretary, said no change in the policy would be made at the national meeting. But he raised the possibility of revising the policy at some point soon so that local Scout organizations could decide on their own whether to allow gays as leaders.

In 2013, after bitter internal debate, the BSA decided to allow openly gay youths as Scouts but not gay adults as leaders. The change took effect in January 2014.

Gates, who became the BSA's president in May 2014, said at the time that he would have favored ending the ban on gay adults, but he opposed further debate after the Scouts' policymaking body upheld the ban.

On Thursday, however, he said recent events "have confronted us with urgent challenges I did not foresee and which we cannot ignore."

He cited the recent defiant announcement by the BSA's New York chapter in early April that it hired the nation's first openly gay Eagle Scout as a summer camp leader. He also cited broader developments related to gay rights.

"I remind you of the recent debates we have seen in places like Indiana and Arkansas over discrimination based on sexual orientation, not to mention the impending U.S. Supreme Court decision this summer on gay marriage," he said. "We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be."

He expressed concern that an eventual court order might strike down the BSA's policy of banning atheists.

"Waiting for the courts is a gamble with huge stakes," he said. "Alternatively, we can move at some future date — but sooner rather than later — to seize control of our own future, set our own course and change our policy in order to allow charter partners, unit sponsoring organizations, to determine the standards for their Scout leaders."

Such an approach, he said, would allow churches, which sponsor about 70 percent of Scout units, to establish leadership standards consistent with their faith.

"I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement," he said. 

The Associated Press