June 12, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A local chapter of the Boy Scouts has sued the City of Philadelphia, saying the city violated the charity’s constitutional rights by telling the scouting group to stop banning gays and atheists from its ranks or start paying market-rate rent on its city-owned offices.
The Boy Scouts chapter had faced a May deadline set by the city to change its policy, begin paying market-rate rent on the office building — about $200,000 a year — or vacate the building, which the group has used as its headquarters for nearly 80 years.
Shelley R. Smith, the city solicitor, said the eviction action is about enforcing the city’s antidiscrimination laws, not stepping on the Boy Scouts’ rights to set their own membership policies. “They may have the right to bar whomever they want, but they don’t have a right to do that on rent-free city property,” Ms. Smith said.
Excluding GayPeople
The federal lawsuit is the latest dust-up between Boy Scouts councils and municipal leaders around the country over the Boy Scouts of America’s longstanding policy of excluding homosexuals from participation and requiring participants to recite a religious oath.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2000 that upheld the Boy Scouts’ right to expel a gay scout leader was widely hailed as affirming the rights of the scouts and other nonprofit groups to set their own membership rules.
But the decision triggered some backlash. Citing their own antidiscrimination policies, some United Ways have cut off or reduced their support of local scouts groups.
And local government officials nationwide have reexamined municipal relationships with the scouts. A handful of lower-court decisions have permitted government agencies to exclude the Boy Scouts from government-run programs or from receiving public benefits.
In Philadelphia, city officials determined in 2003 that the Boy Scouts’ membership policies violated the city’s 1982 Fair Practice Ordinance, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. To avoid eviction from its city-owned headquarters, the Boy Scouts chapter subsequently adopted a nondiscrimination statement in which it opposed “any form of unlawful discrimination.”
After the group failed to clarify the new policy, however, such as by stating what it would consider to be unlawful, the city went ahead with its call for the scouts to move from the city-owned facility.
Jason P. Gosselin, a Philadelphia lawyer representing the local scouts group, called the Cradle of Liberty Council, said the city has overstepped its bounds.
“[The lawsuit] is about not letting the city, using its financial leverage, dictate to the Boy Scouts or any other private organization that it must change its constitutionally protected membership policy or anything else just because the city might not happen to like it,” he said.
