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Can A Choice Be Free if it is Made Under Fear of Lawsuits?
As suspected by many — including me — the Boy Scouts of America National Executive Committee voted unanimously to follow Robert Gate’s recommendation to end the organization’s blanket ban on gay adult leaders, leaving it to individual Scout units to set their own policy on the matter. This is probably the best of both worlds. It avoids having the national organization become the target of lawsuits while granting individual units the flexibility to reflect their values: some accepting gay leaders, some still banning, and some electing to make their decisions on a case-by-case basis.
While some will laud and others deplore this decision, my mind goes to the question of freedom of association. How much liberty does an organization really have if it feels compelled to make a decision out of fear of being sued by a raft of organizations with deep pockets? Does a decision like this really reflect the values of a national association of Scout leaders, or have they been bluffed into taking this position by rationalizing it as good stewardship for their organization? Or is there more to it? Are voting members living in fear of being singled out for special attacks, afraid of not being able or willing to defend themselves against charges of bigotry?
Why is it that organizations that actually have respectable records as defenders of high moral values are reluctant to defend those values, come what may?
How many would actually benefit from this policy? And why should they want to insert themselves in a situation that potentially could be the cause of the breakup of an existing unit or loss of sponsor?
As a parent, I’d find it difficult to object to a gay male who wanted to serve as a Scout leader, if he was an adoptive father, had his son in the Scouts, and was a former Scout himself. For this reason, I think the best policy is for individual units to decide on a case-by-case basis. This makes the new policy not the disaster it could have been, had the national organization decided to allow no exceptions and no discretion. I, therefore, don’t see this outcome as the end of the world for the BSA.
As for liberty, however…
Published in Culture, General
The Left won’t stop here either. The next step may be admission of girls to Boy Scouts (there is already a co-ed program for older scouts called Venturing, but Boy Scouts per se are still restricted to boys). It may be taking another whack at affirmation of the existence of God (and the acceptable range of belief is at least as broad as AA’s affirmation of a “higher power”). Elimination of shooting sports. Who knows? But one way or the other the Left won’t be satisfied until the organization either vanishes due to declining membership, or changes to the point where it is unrecognizable.
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My qualifications to write this are: I am an Eagle Scout; two of my sons are Eagle Scouts; I helped organize a scout troop and was its Committee Chairman for six years; I have dozens of nights of camping as a scout, and dozens of nights of camping as a scouter.
a) I make no proposals regarding what policies the BSA should or should not put in place. I’m not a member of this organization.
b) I can see how a hypothetical parent might hypothetically prefer a blanket ban on homosexuals to a blanket ban on one-on-one physical contact. The near-criminalization of all platonic physical contact isn’t necessarily a social good.
I think this was the best thing that BSA National could have done considering the current situation. They were in a pickle, and this was the only reasonable way to keep from having a major meltdown.
The states will have a huge impact. Boy Scout troops in red states will have a much different situation in comparison to troops in blue states. Blue states will be safe places for troops sponsored by theologically-conservative churches to establish reasonable policies and enjoy their right of association.
Red states have an array of civil rights laws, equal-access laws, non-discrimination laws, etc., that have been written to force everyone to celebrate gayness. They also have an awful juridical landscape of caselaw that tilts against religious groups that actually believe that anything is true or that moral standards exist.
So we will have troops in red states that are trying to carry scouting traditions forward, and troops in blue states that will be leveraging their troops as culture warriors of the Left.
Lord, have mercy.
But if there was a ban on gay scoutmasters, didn’t that mean that, before now, a given troop—say, one chartered by a UCC or UU church in a relatively liberal area—could not have a gay scoutmaster —even one who was a parent?
I think it is best not to convert or to die, best to deflect the blow and revert to controlling the countryside until the law is on your side (which may be never). The BSA is a big target that will eventually be beaten down legally, but individual troops/packs can dissolve and reform at will and so are not worth suing.
My experience has been that troops are generally scrounging for adult help. But I have reviewed and filled out many forms for adult volunteers and no where is there a box for sexual orientation. While, it is true that the adult form goes to the BSA for background check etc. I am not sure what would set off a flag for them now or in the past unless it comes up in the background check.
Again in my experience, it is the troop committee that makes these decisions on a practical level and I think this issue can be best managed at that level.
I think this is the good fight. Suing individual chartering organizations is going to be a lot more difficult than suing the BSA. There are tens of thousands of chartering organizations and this will be the much longer road for the activists. In any case it is the same outcome if they are successful, this just gives the BSA more time to figure out how to manage it.
You are arguing that gay scout leaders is a bad idea, I generally agree with that, but as a tactic, defiance is going to be much easier at the troop level.
I don’t think there could even be a lawsuit at the local level without there being a person being an example of someone being rejected. Being rejected wouldn’t be expected to happen in some places like in the NYC areas; whereas gay applicants in more conservative areas would be few and far between.
I’m thinking because of policy for supporting independence of local troops, the national executive council have almost made themselves irrelevant. The values and traditions of scouting are upheld at the local level. Across the nation, an apparent discordance of hiring policies and expressions might acrue, but those differences will reflect and express values at the local level.
We will be discussing the ramifications for our troop tonight at our council meeting.
Not if they want to be part of the “franchise”. Do you want to own a McDonalds, which means conforming to their standards, or do you want to open your own fast food place, maybe turning it into a franchisable business?
OTOH, individual church groups are all over the place down “heyah,” and they can set their own rules for joining – gay, straight, church members only, non-members welcome . . . and no one can tell them they can’t.
Well, not until now. These days, it’s getting to the point where any outside organization, group, or government can tell any entity how to conduct its business.
Yes it did, but in any franchise the franchisor is able to set rules. You can’t buy a Whopper at McDonalds for example.
It seems clear that the RSJWs (Rainbow Social Justice Warriors) will cherry pick a couple of troops like Sweet Cakes Bakery was cherry-picked. Pour encourager les autres. Even if they don’t prevail in their cause, other chartering organizations will look at the cost and disruption and rethink having a troop.
I’ll tell you a secret, where the rubber meets the road in many ways the national council is irrelevant. There is a lot of infrastucture at the district and council level that needs administration from the national level, but in general it is the local troops that supports the national organization not the reverse. About a third of the money the local troop raises goes to support overhead (which I am not complaining about it is just a fact). The local troop is 99.9% responsible for getting parent volunteers and for recruiting new scouts.
BSA provides curriculum which scouts must generally buy, insurance (at a fee), and most importantly the districts and councils maintain some wonderful campgrounds that the troops can use pretty cheaply. So the executive is not dead weight by any means, but day to day each troop and pack makes its own way.
You are probably right here, but if you read the article, Gates indicated that their option was fighting lawsuits at the national level that they thought they would probably lose.
So we are into Guerrilla warfare here, winning hearts and minds at the local level, civil disobedience, lose battles here and there only to reform and start all over again. I think and hope the left will become tired before we do.
In general, I agree that a guerrilla war is possible with regard to local chartering organizations taking a different moral position than the national BSA national council. But chartering organizations support Scouts as a means to their own ends. A few conservative churches in our town have already called it quits. This decision will likely discourage a few more organizations from continuing to mess with Scouting. Only a small number of lawsuits are needed, with their likely national coverage, to make a complete mess out of what’s left of local BSA units and their charter sponsors.
I’m not encouraged for the future of Boy Scouts.
The upshot of the troop council meeting last night is that our Chaplain recommends we identify more strongly with the church that is our sponsor; making it very clear to observers that we are a Christian troop.
Small private groups like these have no money. I’m not sure whether anyone at all gets paid even. Any punishment for damages would not be quantifiable, at least in wages, if everyone were a volunteer. So a judge would be hard pressed to assess a high fine or punishment for damages. It would look like bullying to pick on these groups.
Another person made the point that because a social service group can easily be broken, it can easily reform. I see the situation as, “Sorry kids. Someone is suing us. Even though we think ultimately we would win, we have no money to fight this lawsuit, so we’re electing to disband the troop, at least over the next year. We will get the word out when another church elects to sponsor us; that might take six months or so. Everyone is encouraged to rejoin the new troop once we determine what the new situation is. Until then, everyone have a nice summer.”
But I think comparison to the bakery, which is considered a public accommodation and can be fined, would not be equivalent, except to make the point about cherry-picking of cases, which we’ve become familiar with now.
I was looking up something else and I found some references to Deuteronomy, which I confess I’ve never read before. Reading a little further, I found this passage. I wonder if perhaps I am showing a bad attitude towards the higher leadership in the Scouts. But anyway, this is how it worked out for the Jews when they first came to the land of Israel.
[Deuteronomy 1: 15-18, edition: The Chumash, The Stone Edition – The Torah, Haftaros and Five Megillos with a Commentary Anthologized from the Rabbinic Writings, Mesorah Publications, Ltd, Brooklyn, NY]