The Boy Scouts of America’s executive committee has voted unanimously to end the ban on gay adults working as leaders.
The Boy Scouts of America executive committee has unanimously approved a resolution to end the organisation’s ban on gay adults working as leaders the BBC reports. A vote of the full executive board is scheduled for July 27, at which point the change is immediately effective.
While openly gay scouts have been able to serve since 2013, the ban on openly gay leaders has remained in place.
The resolution passed by the committee will not require councils or troops to allow out gay leaders, but lifts the prior ban on such leaders. Specifically, the resolution “affirms the right of each chartering organization to reach its own religious and moral conclusions about the specific meaning and application of” the organization’s values.
The move was signalled earlier in the year when, the group’s president, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, spoke on the issue, saying “I must speak as plainly and bluntly to you as I spoke to presidents when I was director of the CIA and secretary of defense,” he said in part. “We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained.”
Article | Levi Joule.
