"I earned the rank of Eagle, the highest rank in Boy Scouts, when I was 13. I love scouting, but I’ve become ashamed of the Boy Scouts of America because it discriminates against gay people. My parents always taught me that everybody should be treated equally. I have a lot of gay friends, and one of them is the minister who leads the church camp I go to every year. He’s taught me a lot about moral values, and when I found out that Scouts discriminate against people like him it just blew my mind away. It was like, wait a minute, this isn’t fair. The Boy Scouts of America doesn’t even seem to follow it’s own Scout law when it discriminates against people that way. The Scout law says that a Scout treats others as he wants to be treated. I don’t know anyone who wants to be discriminated against the way the Boy Scouts of America discriminates against gay people. There is nothing in the Scout oath or law about sexual orientation. The oath says you have to be morally straight, but that doesn’t mean heterosexual, it means just moral. They’ve got that so mixed up. I know some people think that gay people are child molesters, but the BSA I found out actually knows that kids are molested by pedophiles, not by gay people. I couldn’t live with myself if I stayed in Scouting, and so I quit."

I had a powerful experience myself growing up in Scouts. I began at the age of eleven as so many boys do. I didn’t quite get to earn my Eagle badge. I moved at the crucial moment and finished my secondary education in Italy, not America. But my first introduction to what it meant to be a citizen was in Boy Scouts. And I mean a citizen in a global sense because that realization came to me at a World Jamboree held in 1959 in Colorado Springs. I remember Dwight Eisenhower, then President, coming to visit us. We were camped on the grounds of what became the Air Force Academy. I met kids from all around the world. All kinds of different people. And for me Scouts was an opening up to wanting to be a part of a world that embraced all different kinds of people.

Several times during my ministry I found occasion to work with Scouts again. Most particularly during the parish ministry that I held just before I was elected president of our Association, when I served at one of our congregations in New York City. We were working through a children’s task force with the kids then living in the city’s infamous welfare hotels. Two of the young adults in my congregation, a young African-American man and a young Latino man, who had both benefited from scouting enormously in their growing up, met the kids in the Prince George Welfare Hotel in lower Manhattan, and said these kids need a good structured program. Let it be Scouting. We formed the first Scout troop for homeless boys. We were proud to do that as a congregation. We decided to ignore the fact that one of the co-founders of the troop was gay.

All across the country, many conscientious Scout leaders have I suspect over the years been gay. It never was an issue until about 1990, when suddenly the Boy Scouts of America, as a national organization decided to take away from local parents and sponsoring organizations the right of those parents and those sponsoring organizations to judge the fitness of the volunteers working with youth. In setting a blanket policy of discrimination on this point, it’s important to point out that they departed from the practice of virtually every other national youth organization existent. The YWCA does not discriminate. The YMCA does not discriminate. Camp Fire Boys and Girls, and any other national youth organization you can name, have long since decided that the proper thing to do is of course do good screening of volunteers. Set an atmosphere where there is good training about the potential for abuse. Good reporting systems and training of other volunteers to be alert to any potential. But in the course of doing that they’ve also learned what my 15-year old Scout has learned. That the dangers for young boys, men, in scouting don’t come from open and well-adjusted gay people. The Girl Scouts know that. They don’t discriminate.

The Boy Scouts on the other hand, I guess may have decided to play religious politics -- religious politics –- and not to be a civic education organization teaching young people to grow up in a world of real diversity. You see, they could have placed the responsibility for choosing who is an appropriate role model, in the sponsoring organizations behind local troops and Cub packs, quite easily. But the religious politics in which conservative organizations like the Mormon Church play an inordinate role, led them to adopt a policy of blanket discrimination which now has frankly cost them some of the worst press I can imagine descending upon an American organization. Think for a moment, who has gotten worse press in the last six months than the Boy Scouts. Maybe Firestone Tire Company. [audience laughter] And they have literally blown it with many of us. They have spent tens of millions of dollars going all the way to the United States Supreme Court defending their right to discriminate. The concern is not for the children. The concern is the religious politics they’re playing. In many communities across this country, Scout troops are virtually the only youth organizations available for boys. But congregations in my Association, at least, are now deciding that it’s difficult to continue to house or sponsor Scout troops, if indeed the BSA is not going to be controlled by local people, but going to be ordered by Dallas, their headquarters, to be a discriminatory organization that offends the conscience even of 15-year old Eagle Scouts.

Moreover, I have found them flatly guilty of religious politics in the way they have treated people of my own small denomination, because we included in our manual about religious awards for our young people some expressions of dismay at teaching discrimination. They withdrew recognition of our Religion and Life Award, quite arbitrarily. And almost literally threatened that if our young people wore a religious award they had earned from their church on their uniforms, they should be removed by Scout authorities. I won’t speak about the way in which they have treated me personally, refusing to take my telephone calls, insisting in essence that we do not exist as a religious people.

And yet I want you to know that there are other religious communities besides my own, the one represented by this church as well, which feel as I do: Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ, United Methodist Board on Church and Society, the national Episcopal Church at its General Convention this summer. All have similarly expressed concern about how an organization that once had such enormous potential to teach boys and young men not only about tying knots, but also about what it means to grow up as a responsible citizen in a pluralistic world. That organization, because of its playing religious politics, has chosen to abandon its central civic education mission, and has lost the support and the trust of many of us. I tell you that saddens me enormously.

My own children are daughters, but I have nephews who had hoped to go into scouting, and who won’t now. They’ll be deprived of a perfectly good organization because their own religious convictions, like mine, will not be complicit with an organization that attempts to reduce the human worth of an entire category of God’s people. This is not the way to model good behavior for young people. I ask, whatever happened to Scout’s Honor. I ask the people in Dallas, Texas who now run the Boy Scouts, what is honorable about this way of teaching young people. I’m ashamed of the organization. And I virtually weep over what has become of it.