TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070191/0701620.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.2 KB | 152 lines

                                                                                ETHICS, Page 65

Tying the Boy Scouts In Knots


Atheists, girls and gays are suing to join, testing the group's
claim to be a private body in which discrimination is allowed

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- Reported by Steve Hawk/Los Alamitos
and Leslie Whitaker/New York


    Most Americans believe that the Boy Scouts stand for the
best in national values, an image the group achieved in part by
shrewdly staying out of the ever heated debate over what those
values are. For 81 years, while the organization inducted 83
million youths, the popular image of a scout has been benign and
nonpartisan: a polite teenager helping an old lady cross the
street. Chartered by Congress and widely sponsored by schools,
police and fire departments, scouting has carefully marketed
itself as a community-service institution, worthy of donations
and removed from controversy.

    But a new image is emerging. In Illinois, California and
Florida, children are fighting exclusion from the Boy Scouts
based on their being atheist, agnostic or female. An assistant
scoutmaster in California is battling an expulsion imposed
because he is gay. And Boy Scout officials are rewriting popular
mythology, if not history, to assert that the scouts are free
to discriminate because they were always a private club rather
than a public resource.

    Already the contretemps are causing some groups to rethink
their relationship with scouting. In Hinsdale, Ill., where Mark
Welsh, 8, was barred from Cub Scouts because he is an agnostic,
the local school system has temporarily halted the distribution
of recruitment flyers. In Miami, where Margo Mankes, 8, was
expelled by the regional council of Cub Scouts because she is a
girl, her home troop has kept her on as an unofficial member.

    Numerically the organization is in little immediate
danger. After a dip in the '70s, membership surged during the
Reagan era. Today 4.3 million young people belong to Cub Scouts
and its precursor Tigers (for boys 6 to 10), Boy Scouts (boys
11 to 17) and Explorers (both sexes, 14 to 20). The two younger
groups must swear loyalty to God and country. Explorers take no
oath, and thus the 1.2 million-member branch has largely kept
clear of courtroom battles but has weakened scouting's claim
that religious faith is central to its mission.

    An even clearer affirmation of the group's appeal is that
its court adversaries want to join in, not shut it down. Mark
Welsh persisted in suing despite his father Elliott's cautions
because, he says, "there's things I want to do in Cub Scouts --
build bonfires, go camping, pool parties." His 15-month-old case
went to trial last week, and Mark gained a psychic merit badge
in media mania. Testifying was "scary," he said. "I mostly
learned about news cameras."

    Michael and William Randall, twin nine-year-olds from
Anaheim Hills, Calif., have been just as stubborn. They were
excluded from a Cub Scout pack in February because they could
not, as atheists, pledge duty to God. One of their attorneys is
their father James, but he emphasizes that the legal battle was
the twins' idea, not his. He calls the lawsuit "the kiss of
death." Says his son Michael: "I just want to be a member of an
organization and not have to say the word God and not have an
organization force me to say it. They're not a private
organization. They're public. And if they're public, they can't
exclude people who don't believe in God."

    The key legal question is how private the scouts are. When
Margo Mankes' attorney alleged the scouts had violated state and
local laws against sex discrimination, Boy Scouts of America
attorney George Davidson countered, "Congress has authorized the
B.S.A. to maintain a program for boys. It's not open to a state
or local government to change their policies." But the
congressional charter undercuts scouting's additional claims to
be private, so, in discussing the case, spokesman Blake Lewis
says, "The B.S.A. wasn't founded by Congress. We see this as a
larger issue of our constitutional rights as a private
organization."

    The boundary between private association and the public
right to free access has been one of the hardest to draw.
Lawyers targeting the scouts rely in part on
public-accommodation statutes, which were originally used to
regulate restaurants, hotels and the like. In recent years the
laws have been applied to groups such as the Jaycees, which
women argued -- successfully -- was not a private club but a
career-enhancement group.

    Mankes' attorney makes similar arguments. "The scouts are
training boys to be successful," Mark Rubin declares. "The Girl
Scouts' purpose is to make women better homemakers. There is no
alternative as good as the Boy Scouts."

    Timothy Curran, 29, already had his chance for happy
memories of scouting. Now a videotape editor for a local TV news
program in Los Angeles, Curran joined a Berkeley troop in 1975
and quickly progressed to Eagle Scout and assistant scoutmaster.
In 1981 he was expelled because officials had seen a newspaper
photograph of him taking a male date to his high school senior
prom. Curran was a student at UCLA when he was banned. He sued
immediately; a decade later, the case is still unresolved. While
an antigay posture might seem predictable for scouting, Curran
argues that the organization's literature is silent on the issue
and that the manual for scoutmasters specifically prohibits
discussion of sexual matters.

    In all these controversies the motives of the Boy Scouts,
and in some cases their challengers, involve more than the
legal niceties. Curran, for example, is by any reasonable
definition a gay activist. For their part, the scouts are
tending to business interests. In the majority of scout troops,
for example, the religious component is negligible and almost
any professed faith is welcome, from Methodism to Zen. But about
30% of scouts are sponsored by church groups, and those partners
would probably take a dim view if scouting suddenly made belief
in God optional. On the issue of female membership, many young
boys might balk at enrollment if scouting lost its exclusionary
mystique, and the Girl Scouts would surely not welcome the
competition.

    When it comes to gay participation, the overt concern is
about role models, while the unspoken correlative is fear of
child molestation. In practice, an acknowledged homosexual is
an unlikely molester, if only because parents would be watchful,
while married, middle-aged scoutmasters have been known to
transgress.

    The silliest pretense is that the Boy Scouts do not now
number many present or future atheists and homosexuals among
their members. Curran was gay and a scout. Elliott Welsh evolved
agnostic views shortly after leaving the scouts. Their
participation in scouting did not keep them from choosing their
lives and values, nor did their participation destroy scouting.
What is most troubling in the Boy Scouts' new emphasis on
privacy is the hint that the group serves as a retreat for
parents who dislike the diverse and tolerant world of today. But
that is the world their children will grow up to live in
tomorrow.