Scouts’ Honor or America’s Dishonor: a Sampling of Editorials on the Ruling

Chicago Tribune: Freedom of association is one of the keystones of a democratic society.

Churches are allowed to bar atheists, civil-rights groups may exclude Klansmen, and the Green

Party doesn´t have to make room for polluters. But even groups that lack a clear religious or political mission are not obliged to embrace those who they believe reject their values.

So when the Boy Scouts of America relieved James Dale from his position as an assistant scoutmaster after he went public with his homosexuality, it assumed it was within its rights. Dale, an Eagle Scout who had been active in the organization since the age of 8, disagreed and sued the organization.

He claimed that the Scouts are a place of public accommodation and that banishing him violated the New Jersey law forbidding discrimination by such entities on the basis of sexual orientation, among other attributes.

But, by a narrow 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Boy Scouts are hardly comparable to such places of public accommodation. Hence, they have a right to uphold certain beliefs and to exclude leaders whose conduct is at odds with those beliefs. The court refused to press the Scouts into a cookie-cutter mold that purports to preserve diversity by insisting that all groups be the same.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority of the justices, said that the Boy Scouts organization has the mission of instilling what it sees as wholesome values in young people.

Those values, in the organization´s view, are not compatible with homosexual conduct. “Dale´s presence in the Boy Scouts would, at the very least, force the organization to send a message that the Boy Scouts accepts homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior,” said Rehnquist.

None of this means the policy against gays is sensible. Dale was the sort of person the Scouts were proud to be associated with — until he disclosed his sexual orientation. But if he was a good scoutmaster before, it stands to reason that he would be a good scoutmaster after. A Scout is supposed to be trustworthy, loyal, kind, brave, and reverent, and gays are no less capable than anyone else of achieving and teaching all those virtues.

The Boy Scouts were perfectly justified in defending their right to exclude gays as a matter of law. They would be equally justified in realizing that their policy works against the best goals of scouting.

Daily News (New York): Legalized discrimination.

That´s the only way to interpret the Supreme Court´s decision to uphold the Boy Scouts of America´s shameful expulsion of James Dale because he is gay.

Some cold comfort can be taken in the fact that the 5-to-4 vote reflects a deeply divided court. And that the majority opinion did not trade in ugly stereotypes of homosexuals, as did an earlier New Jersey court ruling. Still, with this ruling, the high court has given the Scouts a free pass on bigotry.

Being gay somehow runs afoul of the rule that Scouts be “morally straight. … The Scouts also had the irrational fear that allowing Dale to stay would give homosexuality a stamp of approval. As if it needed that. …

Justice John Paul Stevens notes in his dissenting opinion how the B.S.A. advises members about the trait: “… be a person of strong character, guide your life with honesty, purity and justice. Respect and defend the rights of all people.” Looks like the only “morally straight” person in this drama is Dale.

But in defeat lies a victory, of sorts. As Evan Wolfson, the Lambda Legal Defense attorney who represented Dale, said yesterday, “People will not be able to hear the words ‘Boy Scouts’without thinking the word ‘gay´. And that makes everything possible in terms of changing people´s understanding of who gay people are.”

Deseret News (Salt Lake City): The Supreme Court has wisely decided that the Boy Scouts can bar homosexuals from serving as troop leaders. …

Forcing the Boy Scouts, a private organization, to accept gay troop leaders would violate the organization´s rights of free expression and free association under the Constitution´s First Amendment. …

Since 1910 the Boy Scouts has served as a moral compass to millions of boys worldwide. The good it has done not only for youths but for their families and communities is impossible to calculate. It is a builder of character. Lessons learned during various Scouting activities such as merit badge exercises and camping carry over to adulthood to the betterment of society.

A negative ruling, therefore, would not only have been a terrible blow to the Scout program but to communities around the globe.

If the Scouts were not allowed to exclude people who engaged in actions that run counter to the organization´s beliefs, there would be no end to the requirements heaped on Scouts and all other private groups that become large enough to be deemed a public accommodation. Would denying Boy Scouts the right to mention God in the Scout Law be far behind?

Fortunately, the court, by a narrow 5-4 vote, prevented those terrible spin-off effects.

The Detroit News: The U.S. high court´s ruling retained the important distinction, vital in a free society, between the public and private realms. And it squarely placed the burden on the government to show why a private group should not have free-association rights.

The Boy Scouts had removed an assistant scoutmaster when he declared himself to be a homosexual and became a homosexual rights activist.

The scoutmaster sued, and the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts were a “public accommodation,” like a hotel or a railway station, and thus governed by the state´s antidiscrimination law.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed in an important ruling, which essentially held that government cannot impose a point of view on a private group by declaring it a public place.

The four dissenters argued that homosexuality is becoming more accepted and said the Scouts had not satisfied them that they were expressing a message and that they would be unduly burdened by the New Jersey law.

But the dissent gets the issue exactly backward.

Citizens and groups asserting a constitutional right should not face a burden of satisfying government officials; the government should face the burden of showing why the constitutional rights don´t apply. As Chief Justice William Rehnquist noted in the majority opinion, the fact that the acceptance of gay rights is becoming more popular makes it all the more important to protect the free speech and association rights of a group that doesn´t agree. …

Government has had a growing tendency to impose its views on dissenting groups by declaring them “public” and thus subject to regulation.

In a free society that truly values diversity, however, the right of a private group to freely associate and promote values of its own choosing would not hinge on a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: In ruling 5-4 that the Boy Scouts of America have a constitutional right to exclude — and expel — homosexuals, the U.S. Supreme Court has given properly generous scope to the First Amendment.

As interpreted by the court over the years, that amendment protects not only free speech but also the right to associate with others in order to propound a philosophy.

That doesn´t mean the Boy Scouts’ blanket ban on homosexuals is morally defensible or consistent with the Boy Scout Oath — even that part in which Scouts promise to be “morally straight.” As Chief Justice William Rehnquist conceded in his majority opinion, “the terms morally straight and ‘clean’are by no means self-defining. Different people would attribute to those terms very different meanings.”

What matters, the chief justice said, is the way the Boy Scouts interpret their beliefs.

For the Boy Scout leadership, “morally straight” does mean “sexually straight.” It is not the courts’business, the chief justice added, to “reject a group´s expressed values because they disagree with those values or find them internally inconsistent. …”

The Supreme Court is right in reading the First Amendment to allow the Boy Scouts to exalt hostility to homosexuals to the level of a belief system. But are the Boy Scouts being fair — “morally straight” — in insisting on such an exclusion? That question will be answered not by the courts but by the parents, philanthropists, churches, and community groups on whose good will the Boy Scouts rely.

St. Louis Post Dispatch: What makes the decision doubly discouraging, frankly, is that the Boy Scouts of America is a good organization. But the Scouts’embrace of homophobia, now validated by the highest court in the land, endangers the Scouts’ reputation for inclusiveness. There´s a real possibility that the court ruling will allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay boys as members too. Even as it ends, the case continues to expose a broad streak of hypocrisy in the leadership ranks of the Boy Scouts.

A statement posted on the Boy Scouts’Web site yesterday reads, in part: “Boy Scouting makes no effort to discover the sexual orientation of any person.” In other words, Scouts have a “don´t ask, don´t tell” policy toward homosexuality. …

The most ominous part of the ruling, as Justice Souter noted, is the potential that any group that wants to claim its purpose is to disseminate a specific message — even if advocating that message has never been carried out publicly — will be able to use this decision as “an easy trump of any antidiscrimination law.”

With this ruling, civil-rights advocates will have to work harder than ever to make sure that the right to associate with people of similar minds doesn´t degenerate into the freedom to discriminate at will.