The head of the Boy Scouts of America on Thursday called for an end to the organization’s ban on gay adult scout leaders, describing the policy as unsustainable in a fast-moving climate of social change.
Former US defense secretary Robert Gates, national president of the BSA, warned that the courts could force the organization to change its membership policies if it did not do so on its own.
“The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained,” Gates said at the group’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Boy Scouts has been beset by internal bickering and legal wrangling over the issue of allowing gay scoutmasters, amid defiant moves by scout councils in New York, Denver and elsewhere to flout the ban.
Gates, a past head of the CIA as well as being defense secretary under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, attained the pinnacle of scouting himself as a youth by earning the rank of Eagle Scout.
He cited “social, political and juridical changes taking place in our country, changes taking place at a pace over this past year no-one anticipated.”
“We must all understand that this will probably happen sooner rather than later,” he said, adding, however, that he was not asking the national board to immediately change its policy during the current gathering.
The BSA in January 2014 officially began accepting gay youths into their ranks, after a more than two-decade ban against homosexual scouts.
A few months earlier, in May 2013, the Boy Scouts’ national council voted to no longer deny membership to youth on the basis of sexual orientation, but it retained its ban on gay and lesbian adult Scout leaders.
Rights groups welcomed Gates’ comments but called on the scout movement to make full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people a national policy.
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