NEW YORK — The Boy Scouts of America have ended a blanket ban on gay adult leaders while allowing church-sponsored Scout units to maintain the exclusion because of their faith.
The new policy, aimed at easing a controversy that embroiled the Boy Scouts for years and threatened the organization with lawsuits, takes effect immediately. It was approved Monday by the BSA’s 80-member National Executive Board in a teleconference.
The stage had been set for Monday’s action on May 21, when the BSA’s president, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, told the Scouts’ national meeting that the long-standing ban on participation by openly gay adults was no longer sustainable. He said the ban was likely to be the target of lawsuits that the Scouts were likely to lose.
Two weeks ago, the new policy was approved unanimously by the BSA’s 17-member National Executive Committee. It would allow local Scout units to select adult leaders without regard to sexual orientation — a stance that several Scout councils already adopted in defiance of the official national policy.
In 2013, after heated internal debate, the BSA decided to allow openly gay youths as Scouts but not gay adults as leaders. Several denominations that sponsor large numbers of Scout units — including the Roman Catholic church, the Mormon church and the Southern Baptist Convention — have been apprehensive about ending the ban.
The BSA’s top leaders have pledged to defend the right of any church-sponsored units to continue excluding gays as adult volunteers.
Under the proposed new policy:
• Prospective employees of the national organization could no longer be denied a staff position on the basis of sexual orientation.
• Gay leaders who previously were removed from Scouting because of the ban would have the opportunity to reapply for volunteer positions.
• If otherwise qualified, a gay adult would be eligible to serve as a Scoutmaster or unit leader.
• There would be no change in the long-standing requirement that youth and adult Scout members profess a “duty to God.”
Gates, who became the BSA’s president in May 2014, said at the time that he personally would have favored ending the ban on gay adults, but he opposed any further debate after the Scouts’ policymaking body upheld the ban. In May, however, he said at the BSA’s annual national meeting that recent events “have confronted us with urgent challenges I did not foresee and which we cannot ignore.”
