End the War on Freedom

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED APRIL 28, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
We're the quota police, and we're here to help

James Dale of New Jersey -- who changed his name before filing suit against the Boy Scouts of America -- is the younger son of Gerald Dick, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve.

Dale was a Cub Scout at age 8; an Eagle Scout at 17. His mom was a den mother. While a student at a military high school in New Jersey, "I remember hoping to God that I wouldn't be gay," Dale told The New York Times in 1992. But he now recalls his "friendship with a gay man" the summer between his freshman and sophomore years helped him "accept his homosexuality."

Young Dale joined the campus gay and lesbian organization, becoming co-president after three months. After he was quoted in that capacity in a local newspaper story, the Monmouth Council of the Boy Scouts, which 16 months earlier had approved Dale's application to be an assistant scoutmaster of Troop 73 in Matawan, N.J., notified Dale that his registration was revoked.

Two years later, immediately after New Jersey enacted a law protecting the civil rights of gays, Dale filed a lawsuit against the Scouts, apparently charging them with violating the new law before it was enacted. That case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court April 26.

The Boy Scouts say homosexuality violates the organization's oath requiring scouts to be "morally straight."

"We've always taught traditional family values," says Gregg Shields, national spokesman for the organization. "An avowed homosexual would not be a role model for those values."

But the Scouts -- since their troops often meet in public school buildings and cooperate with the government in such projects as trash cleanups -- offer a "public accommodation" and thus "cannot discriminate against any young boy or young man because of his identity as gay," responds Evan Wolfson, who argued Dale's case before the court.

Here we again see how the "public accommodation" rationale has turned into a dangerous carte blanche for ever more government meddling, even if the initial desire to assure black folk "first class citizenship" was a noble one. But is this really a "discrimination" case, equivalent to ordinances which once empowered local police to boot folks of the wrong complexion from otherwise public lunch counters?

The Boy Scouts have an exemplary record of religious tolerance -- 65 percent of Boy Scout troops and Cub Scout Packs are sponsored by religious organizations -- 1,200 denominations in all. All troops are open to boys of any religion. Nor does the organization discriminate based on race.

In fact, it's the New Jersey state Supreme Court which seemed to wander into previously unexplored constitutional shadowlands when it asserted in its earlier decision in Dale's favor that Scout troops aren't the kind of "intimate association" protected by the Bill of Rights.

Now, in my experience, the "moral code" of the Boy Scouts remains largely theoretical. I was a Scout for a brief time, and even by the '60s the general attitude seemed to be that the kids should be allowed to fudge most of the advancement and merit badge requirements as long as it kept them involved. I learned to tie a few knots, but primarily the troop was the best place in my small, rural town for underage youths to cop cigarettes and porn magazines.

Still, whether we agree with this outfit's "moral code" -- either that professed on paper, or the kind of hazing actually practiced on the skinny kids with the eyeglasses at the average Scout camp -- do we really want to live in an America where an association of women lawyers is required to admit a male cab driver in search of a rich wife; in which the NAACP is required to admit a handful of Klansmen hoping to get their hands on a membership list complete with home addresses; in which churches are forced by the government to provide "equal time" at their pulpits to those preaching views which the congregation finds antithetical?

Is there no place remaining from which we can still tell the government fixers to "keep out"? As the Boy Scouts sensibly point out in their brief, "A society in which every organization must be equally diverse is a society which has destroyed diversity."

I have gay friends; they're not child molesters. But I don't know that the Girl Scouts should be required to accept heterosexual men in their sleep-over tents, either.

Happily, the present case is one in which constitutional principles and common sense are well aligned. Simply put, a private organization ought to have the right to set its own membership requirements, and to expel those who assert sharply differing doctrines.

Or shall the high court next take up the cause of the excommunicants who seek a government guarantee of "equal time" to preach the Catharist heresy -- or perhaps the worship of the horned goat-god -- from Christian pulpits?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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