BSA President Robert M. Gates offered a solution: End the blanket ban and allow Scout troops to make their own decisions on leadership.
Gates, who formerly served as the U.S. Secretary of Defense and director of the CIA, was elected president of the organization last year and warned that the policy could cause legal challenges. During his time as Secretary, he pushed for the repeal of the controversial Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell legislation, which required that gay or lesbian service members to hide their sexual orientation or face discharge.
Don’t Ask, Don’t tell was repealed in 2011 after President Obama signed legislation ending it in December 2010, according to the Human Rights Campaign website.
In the statement, he told the audience that the current policy is “unsustainable” and makes the organization vulnerable to the power of the courts.
“We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be,” he said. “The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained.”
He said he is not asking for a national overhaul in policy at this time, but he left the door open for potential change in the future.
“We can expect more councils to openly challenge the current policy,” he said. “While technically we have the authority to revoke their charters, such an action would deny the lifelong benefits of scouting to hundreds and thousands of boys and young men today and vastly more in the future. I will not take that path.”
However, IU professor Beth Gazley said the approach is “passing the buck” and won’t be good for the organization, according to an IU press release. Gazley said this call to action by Gates was the push the organization needed to overhaul policy, but said there is reason to be leery of it.
“Since the BSA of America membership voted in 2013 to end their policy of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, observers have waited for the other shoe to drop,” she said in the release. “This is it.”
Local councils have begun hiring openly gay troop leaders in defiance of the ban, which Gates acknowledged in his statement.
There are, however, two main reasons for caution in its wake, Gazley said.
The first is the local councils who would have the power to decide their own policies are often sponsored by churches. ?Secondly, it lets the national council off the hook.
“It’s the least courageous aspect of what seems on the face of it like a courageous stand in favor of gay rights,” she said. “It’s not courageous because discrimination by local councils can still happen.”
It also leaves the organization fractured if each troop gets to decide what its policy is, she said.
“The mission of a united BSA of America will be increasingly diluted in favor of local councils,” she said. “Can the Scouts survive with 100,000 different local units, each with a different view of what being a Boy Scout means?”
