While millions of Americans were picking up their newspapers and opening their Web browsers to learn that the Boy Scouts of America had decided to allow openly gay members, Bill Price was putting on his uniform, just as he has five days a week for the past 37 years - lacing his hiking boots and straightening the collar of his beige shirt with the American flag patch on the right shoulder.
It was Friday, May 24. The day before, 757 voting members at the Boy Scouts of America’s national meeting - 61 percent of the 1,232 voting delegates - had cast their ballots in favor of a change in the organization’s membership policy that will allow openly homosexual Scouts. Speculation ensued about why the organization decided to change its policy, which allowed neither gay Scouts nor gay troop leaders.
But Price, program director for the Boy Scouts of America’s Quapaw Area Council, put on his uniform and went to work just the same. He’s one of many in the scouting community who have pledged their loyalty to the organization regardless of the policy change, which takes effect Jan. 1.
In the fall, a special subcommittee of the national organization will present its plans on how local troops should implement and explain the policy change. And although the dust of the fallout has started to settle, it remains unclear how the change will affect an organization that has seen significant declines in membership. Boy Scout youth membership totals about 2.7 million, according to the Scouts’ website, millions below what it was in previous decades.
Of about 385 chartering organizations in the Quapaw Area Council - which supports troops and packs in 39 Arkansas counties - 39 have or will cut ties with troops they have sponsored, according to Scout Executive John Carman. Unlike some other councils - the organizations that oversee local groups- the Quapaw Area Council continues to grow. It has 11,500 members.
About 15 parents in the Quapaw council have removed their children from Boy Scouts after the policy change, Carman said. And about 50 of the 4,000 adult volunteers have left scouting because of the new policy.
ANNOUNCING THE CHANGE
The Boy Scouts Executive Committee proposed the change in April, about eight months after it publicly reaffirmed its original policy. In an April 29 meeting streamed online to voting members, the committee shared the results of months of surveys on the potential changes. The committee members said they don’t want Scouts to leave the program because of their sexual orientation.
“It was never the intent of our policy for the BSA to keep young people from being part of this organization,” Vice President for Marketing Nathan Rosenberg said in the video, which had 500 online viewers. “We concluded that kids are our priority, period. And we all know kids are much better off when they stay in scouting.”
Rosenberg said the move wasn’t a response to outside pressures.
“Our boys are not going to be political pawns,” he said.
The committee members shared their personal opinions with one another before tackling the resolution, said Rosenberg, who assured viewers that every opinion had representation in the committee.
“I support this resolution, although I’ve been told it doesn’t go far enough or goes too far,” Lyle Knight, vice president for human resources, said in the video. “For today - just today - I think it’s the right move because we lack consensus on any of the issues except the youth issue. It’s the only one we could line up behind.”
The policy change emphasizes that sexual activity remains prohibited among Scouts, and its supporters say it recognizes that there’s a difference between children and adults when sexuality is involved.
“Kids that age don’t know if they’re homosexual - they don’t know if they’re heterosexual,” said Carman. “They’re still trying to make up their minds, and dealing with those issues is part of growing up.”
REACTIONS AND REASONING
The news that the national executive committee was considering a change in the membership policy came as a shock to Carman and the rest of the Quapaw council earlier this year.
“Both on a professional and a volunteer level, we were surprised,” Carman said. “The BSA came out in July of last year and … stood their ground on [the old] policy, so to come out seven months later and say, ‘We’re revisiting this, and we’re proposing a resolution to change it’ - that certainly caught us off guard.”
Boy Scouts spokesmen would not grant interviews with the members of the executive committee, and they would not explain why the organization suddenly changed its policy.
But there are plenty of theories about the change, said authors Alvin Townley and Jay Mechling, who have written books on the Boy Scouts’ long-carved niche in the American cultural landscape.
Townley said the Boy Scouts’ reaffirmation of its previous membership policy last year - just a week before the organization’s centennial anniversary - “very unnecessarily” stirred up a hornets’ nest that it could no longer ignore. Companies like Caterpillar, United Way and Intel withdrew sponsorship funding in reaction to the organization’s stance on homosexuality.
“The board realized it had to do something,” Townley said. “Throughout history, excluding has never been a positive. As American society has become more inclusive, scouting’s former exclusionary policy has ostracized people.”
Mechling said the former policy included a key contradiction.
“You’re forcing people to be untruthful about a very fundamental part of themselves in an organization that values honor and trustworthiness,” he said.
The policy change wasn’t just a move to make the organization “more progressive,” Mechling said; it was a business decision. Members of the National Executive Board include powerful business leaders like Ernst & Young Chief Executive Officer James Turley and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, he said. AT&T, which is listed on the Boy Scouts website as an organization sponsor, and Ernst & Young both have anti-discrimination policies related to sexual orientation. Before the recent change, the two men had said they would try to change the Boy Scouts membership policy.
Millions of dollars of financial backing were on the line, Mechling said. He expects the change will repair some financial damage, although no former sponsors have returned. And some former sponsors have refused to restore funding until the Boy Scouts allow openly gay adults as well as children.
Mechling said he’s unsure whether the change will reverse a “conservative, religious trajectory” the Scouts have been on in recent years.
“The long range was they were going to lose more and more members,” Mechling said. “They were going to become the youth program of several large churches. They were no longer going to be the American youth program we once knew.”
In June, the national Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution expressing disagreement with the Scouts’ policy change. Southern Baptists and other religious groups have vowed to find other options for youth leadership programs that they say are more in line with their religious beliefs.
LOOKING AHEAD
Scouting members in the state are ambivalent about the change. Scouting professionals and troop leaders denied the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette interviews with Scouts. They said they didn’t want the children to discuss sexual matters with reporters.
Don Cole, scoutmaster for Troop 30, which is chartered by St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Little Rock, said his troop hasn’t had any organized discussion about the policy change.
“I don’t think it’ll affect our day-to-day operations,” he said. “Our scouting troop is about the camping, the programs and the education.”
All four area council executives in Arkansas said they couldn’t recall a Scout being removed from the program because of his sexuality, although it’s happened in other states.
Carman, the Quapaw Area Council Scout executive, said the effects of the policy change, made nationally, will dissipate as it spreads toward the local branches.
“You go to camp, and you can’t tell that this resolution was ever an issue,” Carman said. “And to the kids, it’s not. That’s just the way society is going. To the boys, they’re just out having a good time.”
Carman said the loss of volunteers is significant, because each is “a crucial part of the organization.”
“But when you’re talking about 4,000 volunteers and 11,500 youth members, that 50 is not a significant impact overall,” he said. “We’ll continue to serve approximately that many kids and hopefully more.”
Carman said he expects the majority of volunteers, Scouts and chartering organizations that would leave the Boy Scouts because of the policy change have already left. He said most will stay although the change disappointed them because they believe in the organization’s mission.
“If you leave the program, you can’t affect the lives of young people,” said Price, the Quapaw program director. “Some people say, ‘Bill stayed, so [he] must condone this.’ It’s not a matter of that. It’s a matter of - show me a better program for boys. There’s nothing better.”
Mechling said the Scouts will have to adjust the policy to allow gay leaders in the future. The tension of the compromise will eventually be “too much to bear,” he said.
Townley said he’s happy to see the Boy Scouts adopt what he sees as a more progressive, modern stance. But as disagreement on the policy continues, he said it’s hard not to worry about the future of the organization he joined as a child and has made a focus of his professional career.
“Scouting is one place where diverse people have always come together, and if America’s so polarized that we can’t come together inside the [organization], then I’m really worried about our country’s future,” he said.
Others are more optimistic that the change is sufficient and that local groups will accept it.
Tom Buffenbarger, assistant treasurer of the National Executive Committee and a life-long scouting participant who spoke in the April Internet broadcast, said he learned from his scoutmaster as a child that life is a series of changes.
“We can resist change,” he said. “We can fear it, flee from it, deny it. Or we can recognize it when it is upon us, and - in the end - make it work for us. Mastering change requires us … to be brave and go forward the best we’re able. That’s where we’re at at this point in time in the life of the Boy Scouts of America.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/11/2013