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The Boy Scout law a year from today: A Scout is trustworthy loyal, helpful friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent ... and maybe an atheist or homosexual, too. Once, the Boy Scout law read like the chivalrous code of King Arthur and his knights. But if Timothy Curran and Elliott Welsh prevail, the law could soon sound more like the credo of the American Civil Liberties Union. In separate lawsuits, the two former Scouts have claimed that much of the Boy Scouts' long-standing "Three G" membership policy-which specifically bans gays, godless and girls-is discriminatory, as outmoded as the swastika badges Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts, once distributed as tokens of gratitude. Curran, a gay ex-Eagle Scout, and Welsh, an agnostic who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, have both won preliminary legal battles with the Boy Scouts, edging the revered organization toward a kind of identity crisis. But Ben Love, chief Scout executive, vows to fight the admission of gays and atheists all the way to the Supreme Court. "A homosexual," says Love, "is not the role model I would want as the leader of my son's troop - and neither is an atheist." In the broadest sense, the clash between the Boy Scouts and Welsh and Curran echoes the clash of two traditions that have defined scouting since its inception in the United States in 1910. The Boy Scouts' penchant for uniforms, flag ceremonies and merit badges has at times given the group an almost paramilitary air and even helped inspire Mussolini in the 1930s to create his own youth organization to indoctrinate boys. Yet the Boy Scouts also have a long history of tolerance and pluralism. Churches of virtually every denomination sponsor troops, and Boy Scout regulations encourage boys to respect other religions and races. "All I'm doing is holding the Boy Scouts to their own standards," insists Curran, the gay ex-Eagle Scout. "It defies common sense that BSA [Boy Scouts of America] can include knee-jerk liberals, Jews, blacks, Hindus and Zoroastrians-but must exclude gays." On the rebound. Ironically, Curran and Welsh's civil-rights suits coincide with a resurgence in scoring's popularity, as the youth group becomes more diverse and sheds its Norman Rockwell trappings. Even in 1991, the Scouts remain one of the premier character-building organizations for young boys in the nation. Roughly half of American boys try cub scouting (ages 7-10), and about 1 in 5 experiment with boy scouting (ages 11-18). Former Boy Scouts are especially prevalent in positions of leadership: About 80 percent of the members of Congress have participated in scouting (as have 60 percent of the country's astronauts). Nationwide, BSA membership is now up to 4.3 million, an increase of nearly 40 percent since 1979. In part, the Boy Scouts' renaissance stems from a repackaging campaign to make scouting more "relevant" to older Scouts. Since the mid-'80s, the BSA has expanded career counseling into schools and added team athletic programs. But it has also incorporated some changes that might make fusty ex-Scouts wince. It has issued a new edition of the legendary Scout handbook that opens with a 24-page guide for parents on protecting children from sex abuse and the temptation of drugs. And this year, it added an official outfit for sports and hiking consisting of a red polo shirt and khaki shorts-that looks more like L. L. Bean togs than the de rigueur olive Scout uniform and colored neckerchief. In a way, efforts to modernize the Scouts mirror and exaggerate troublesome changes in the nature of childhood itself. A sampler of scoring's nettlesome issues in the 1990's includes: Child Abuse. As Lee Sneath, a BSA spokesperson puts it, the Scouts "provide natural hunting ground for pedophiles." But publicized incidents of abuse, including the disclosure in 1988 that the Boy Scouts had internal records detailing over 200 examples of sexual misconduct by adult leaders, goaded the BSA into launching an aggressive anti-abuse campaign. Today, the new Scout Handbook instructs kids in the novel "3 R's": "Recognize, Resist and Report." Giving new meaning to the Scout motto "be prepared," BSA guidelines now discourages skinny-dipping and forbid boys to sleep in the tent of an adult other than his parent or guardian. They also exclude one-on-one contact between adults and boys, specifying that: scoutmasters hold their traditionally private conferences with boys "in view of other adults and youths." According to Sneath, reports of child abuse from BSA members have roughly doubled since 1987. "That increase is exactly what we wanted," he says, "because until the cases are reported, you can't weed them out." Minorities. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are still under represented in scouting. At last count, in 1988, roughly 13 percent of Boy Scouts were minorities, compared with about 23 percent in the U.S. as a whole. Still, the BSA does aggressively seek to enlist minorities and inner-city youth. The organization has roughly 5,500 Scouts in public-housing projects, and it now supplements that long-standing program by recruiting kids in New York City welfare hotels and promoting scouting as "a survival program" for inner-city boys. When no country hikes are nearby, the BSA advises troop leaders to "play street games and learn city survival skills." Troop leaders also are encouraged to read the sentimental poetry of Khalil Gibran to better understand the need for racial diversity. One touted Gibran quotation: "But let there be spaces in your togetherness." Drugs. To preview its new anti-drug pamphlets in 1987, the Boy Scouts first convened a focus group of boys. "The kids," says Boys' Life Publisher J. Warren Young, "wanted us to be tougher, gorier, even bloodier. They wanted Freddy on Elm Street." Accordingly, the Scouts' award-winning anti-drug pamphlet features a description of "killer drugs" and a grim comic strip on Enrique Camarena, a Drug Enforcement Administration officer who was tortured and murdered by Mexican drug lords in 1985. The Scouts, once renowned for shepherding old ladies across the street, are now urged to "avoid talking to strangers in your neighborhood. . . . This stranger may be a drug dealer." The U.S. Customs Service even trains Scouts from the BSA's Explorer division (ages 14 to 20) to help inspectors at New York's JFK airport frisk suspect travelers and look for contraband. While some of the trappings have changed, BSA officials maintain that the Scouts still adhere to their traditional character-forging mission. Members regularly recite the Scout oath and law at troop meetings, band together to help the poor and hungry and go on rugged camping trips. But the lawsuits brought by Curran and Welsh could threaten even venerable Scout values. Scout officials, for example, contend that provisions of the Scout oath and law precluded Curran, now a freelance videotape editor in Los Angeles, from serving as an assistant troop leader because homosexuals are not "morally straight" or "clean." Yet the BSA's bylaws also state that advancement is "based entirely upon individual merit." By the latter standard, Curran excelled as a Scout. He attained his eagle badge in only four years (an honor earned by less than 3 percent of all Scouts) and even organized a new troop of deaf Scouts in Oakland, Calif. Only after Curran disclosed in a 1980 newspaper interview that he took a male date to the prom did the Boy Scouts decide he lacked the requisite merit to work with his Berkeley-based troop. The truth is that the Boy Scouts' broad-based appeal has always rested partly on their ability to promote wholesome "family values" without specifying too exactly how those values should be enforced. In its literature for parents of Scouts, the BSA admonishes that "no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God" but then adds that it is "absolutely nonsectarian in its attitude toward religious training." Indeed, BSA officials acknowledge that they currently define belief in God so loosely that a young boy could privately mistake Michael Jackson for the Messiah and still be a Scout. Unfortunately for the BSA, Elliott Welsh was one of the few parents who balked at their nebulous religious requirements. A computer consultant in Hinsdale, Ill., Welsh last achieved notoriety in 1970 as a conscientious objector, when the Supreme Court threw out his three-year prison sentence and held that draft resisters could object to war on ethical as well. as religious grounds. After that, Welsh essentially abandoned, his political activism. In fact, he initially was pleased when his 6-year old son Mark asked to join the Tiger Cubs in 1989 because Welsh remembered his own scouting adventures as "tinged with a kind of Field of Dreams' quality." When he discovered the BSA's religious requirement, Welsh assumed it was "outmoded boilerplate"; when local Scout officials told him it wasn't, he felt obliged to oppose the policy. "Twenty-five years ago, I faced a three-year prison term for saying I didn't believe in a Supreme Being," explains Welsh. "I'm not about to retract that now to get Mark into the Boy Scouts." If the BSA is forced to admit atheists and gays, the practical consequences will likely be limited, as least initially. As U.S. District Judge Ilana Rovner, a Reagan appointee, wrote in Welsh's case, "requiring the Boy Scouts to admit individuals who do not believe in God would not require the organization to alter any of its activities." Already, Big Brothers, an organization with goals similar to the BSA's, allows chapters to employ gay volunteer mentors for children, and the Scouts themselves started accepting women scoutmasters in 1988--a reform they fought in court and now welcome. Yet while gays and atheists might not radically reshape the practice of scouting, they would undercut public support for the institution. Many of the churches that sponsor the majority of BSA troops deem homosexuality immoral. Thousands of parents might revolt as well, especially if their boys were in troops led by gays or atheists. No doubt some orthodox ex-Scouts would rebel, too, against modifying trusty rituals. The Scout oath still requires a boy to do his "duty to God." And without the oath, insists BSA head Ben Love, "scouting is just not scouting." Ultimately, in the tug of war between permissiveness and prohibition, the Scouts might do well to hold less tightly to
tradition. Recent biographies of the Scouts' acclaimed founder, Lord Robert Baden-Powell of Britain, show that he favored admitting atheists to the Scouts; they also report he was a repressed homosexual who savored photos of naked boys. As
they seek to maintain their beloved traditions in the 1990s, even the Scouts are finding that nothing is sacred |
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