Goodbye, Gay Ban: What the Boy Scouts Must Do Now
When you make Eagle Scout – the highest rank a youth can earn in the Boy Scouts of America – the adult leaders in your troop tell you, “This is just the beginning.” At the time, this is a frustrating thing to hear. You’ve completed up to seven years of work rising through the ranks, leading your fellow scouts and earning merit badges, and the adults – in typical adult fashion – are telling you you’re only getting started?
But on Monday night, when the Boy Scouts finally lifted its ban on gay adults, that phrase felt appropriate. This really is just the beginning. There is much work to do.
As the son of a same-sex couple from Iowa, and the co-founder and executive director of Scouts for Equality, I couldn’t be happier to see the Boy Scouts take this step. The group’s ban on gay adults and youth had been in place since 1978; the Boy Scouts had long asserted that homosexuality was immoral and had no place in Scouting. The group defended its right to discriminate all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Boy Scouts in 2000. The change in policy means a gay teen who’s about to become an Eagle Scout doesn’t have to fear being thrown out of the organization when he turns 18. It means gay parents don’t have to worry about being removed from their son’s troop.
Monday’s vote was the culmination of three years of campaigning by Scouts for Equality staff and supporters, which were preceded by decades of work by the LGBT activists and straight allies who came before us. I co-founded Scouts for Equality in June 2012, after Jen Tyrrell, a lesbian den mother from Ohio, was thrown out of her son’s Cub Scout pack. Several weeks later, the Boy Scouts doubled down on its ban, saying it had completed a two-year review of the rule, and it wasn’t going to change. We worked with groups including GLAAD to call attention to the ban, and explained how it affected families like Tyrrell’s and stigmatized gay youth.
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