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A new policy allowing openly gay youth to participate in Boy Scouts of America but continuing to prohibit LGBT adults from serving as leaders went into effect Wednesday. But despite dire warnings from anti-LGBT activists that even this half-measure would be catastrophic for the organization, very few religious organizations have abandoned the organization over the policy.
The organization voted to lift its ban on gay youth last May, with 61 percent in support. At the same time, it reaffirmed its policy requiring discrimination against any openly LGBT person over the age of 18.
A few religious groups objected to even this partial change. The Assemblies of God, an anti-gay Pentecostal denomination, and the Southern Baptist Convention both promised a mass exodus from the organization and a small group of anti-LGBT activists have launched a Christian-only BSA alternative.
But the mass exodus has simply not materialized. A BSA spokesman noted that the vast majority of religious groups have stayed with the organization despite the policy shift. The BSA estimates that less than 2 percent of its 116,000 Scout units were abandoned by their sponsors.
And even in some very conservative places, those abandoned troops have found new backers. Joey Kiker, spokesman for the Greater Alabama Council in Birmingham, told a local newpsaper that while a few churches that sponsored Scout units have left, every single unit that lost a charter partner, within an hour, had a new charter partner. And Brad Haddock, a national board member from Wichita, Kansas likened the warnings to the Y2K scare. There hasnt been a whole lot of fallout, he told the Associated Press, observing that If a church said they wouldnt work with us, wed have a church right down the street say, Well take the troop.
Of course it hasnt.But the mass exodus has simply not materialized.
Will they show gay scouts aids wards in hospitals?
I pulled my son out of that organization last year. Just in the nick of time.
Agreed. No decent parent will allow their child to go "camping", alone in the woods, with a known homo. Why not just look up all the sex offenders in your neighborhood and ask them to watch your kid for a weekend?The BSA will eventually become all gay.
The chances of the public learning the truth is slim to none. Even if a troop leaves a church and goes to another, how many boys transitioned? Did the troop go from 50 to 15.
Boy scout troops don't just meet in a church, the boys who attend that church belong to the troop. It is unlikely that entire families will change churches to accommodate a gay boy scout troop. The BSA will eventually become all gay.
Agreed. No decent parent will allow their child to go "camping", alone in the woods, with a known homo. Why not just look up all the sex offenders in your neighborhood and ask them to watch your kid for a weekend?The BSA will eventually become all gay.
Of course it hasn’t.But the mass exodus has simply not materialized.
Such predictions were nothing more than failed demagoguery and fear-mongering by most on the social right hostile to gay Americans.
