It is perhaps fitting that Boy Scouts of America national president Robert Gates chose a speech in Atlanta to call for an end to the longstanding ban on openly gay leaders.
A city known as the South’s largest mecca for gays and lesbians, Atlanta embraces scouting, with one of the most active councils in the country. It also sits in the far more socially conservative state of Georgia, underscoring the challenges the boy scouts will face moving forward as they seek to knit together disparate but deeply-held beliefs under the banner of the same organization.
Word of Gates’ speech Thursday at the Boy Scouts of America annual meeting, ricocheted through the scouting community in Georgia and earned mixed reactions.
“The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained,” he said.
Some praised the move as long overdue.
“It’s about freakin’ time,” said Robert Ross with a laugh. Ross’ 12-year-old son David is a longtime Boy Scout. Ross, a former scout himself, is gay.
But others expressed resigned acceptance, preferring that the ban on gay adults remain in place while at the same time acknowledging that the shift is probably inevitable. They took solace in Gates’ suggestion on Tuesday that troops would be able to decide for themselves whether to permit gay leaders.
“It’s not going to go away. It’s going to keep coming at us and at least this allows some control,” said Larry Bishop, an assistant scoutmaster in Marietta.
“I wouldn’t want a gay leader for my son,” Bishop said. “There’s no trust there. I don’t understand it and I don’t think I ever will.”
Gates on Thursday said change is needed to the BSA policy banning participation by openly-gay adult. Brewing legal fights brewing could spell a death sentence for the 105-year-old organization unless it moves to address the problem itself, he said.
“I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement,” Gates said.
The Boy Scouts policy on gay leaders has been under attack after the New York chapter in early April that it had hired the nation’s first openly gay Eagle Scout as a summer camp leader.
No change will be made at the national meeting which continues in Atlanta into the weekend. But Gates raised the possibility of revising the policy at some point soon so that local Scout organizations could decide on their own whether to allow gays as leaders.
Gates, who became the BSA’s leader in May 214 also played an influential role in the Obama administration’s repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” which banned gays from serving openly in the military.
Unlike the Girl Scouts — who have no ban on on gay scouts and leaders and even recently revealed they allow transgender scouts — the Boy Scouts have struggled with how to handle issues of inclusion and homosexuality.
That’s in part because the Boy Scouts are so closely tied to religious organizations. Boy Scouts must have a charter, said Chip Turner, chairman of the Boy Scouts National Religious Relations Committee said. And some 70 percent of those charters are with religious or faith-based organizations.
“I think some people are still struggling with this,” Turner said. “Even within people of faith there is some divergence of the opinion.”
In January 2014 the BSA began allowing openly gay boys in scouting after a rancorous public debate. But the ban on gay leaders remained intact.
Turner said some religious leaders who may be OK with accepting gay youth may draw the line the at gay adults, who they believe will exert greater influence.
And even the decision to admit gay scouts had fallout. The move was condemned by the Southern Baptist Conventions. And in Georgia, the Roswell Street Baptist Church cut ties with a boy scout troop in 2013, ending a 68 year relationship, once the Boy Scouts began accepting gay teens.
For now local scout councils are remaining officially mum on the matter,
Jason Baldridge, of the Atlanta Area Council Boy Scouts of America, said the group had no comment on Gates’ announcement calling it a national policy matter.
“We’ve got our heads down now focused on summer camp,” Baldridge told the AJC.
The Atlanta council serves some 32,000 members.
Ross, the Atlanta parent, said he and his partner thought long and hard about whether to allow their son to enter scouting, given its policies which seemed hostile to his lifestyle.
“In the end we decided the program had enough merit to it that we didn’t want to penalize our child because of some lunacy at the top,” Ross said. “Self reliance, respect for others There is so much good that comes from a program like the scouts.”
Ross said he’s been welcomed into the troop in his Grant Park community and has even taken on some leadership roles, although not working directly with children.
There’s just one Boy Scout activity he shies away from camping.
“I don’t do camping. I don’t like camping,” Ross said. “I like camping at the Hilton.”
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