Posted on 03/07/2003 9:10:09 PM PST by CounterCounterCulture
By: Mark Pulliam
The Boy Scouts of America are under attack—again—this time from an unlikely source: the organized bar.
Notwithstanding the 2000 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America vs. Dale, affirming the constitutional right of the Boy Scouts to exclude avowed homosexuals as adult leaders, the battle is not over. Groups opposed to the traditional values espoused by the Boy Scouts continue their campaign of intimidation and pressure. In California, several local bar associations are seeking to ostracize the Boy Scouts by prohibiting state court judges from participating in the organization on the ground that its ban on homosexual leaders makes it a “hate group” akin to the KKK. San Francisco’s judges have already formally cut ties with the Scouts.
The contention that the Boy Scouts should be shunned by respectable people—literally treated as outcasts—is profoundly misguided, for several reasons. First, the Boy Scouts are an American institution—a national icon. Over 3.3 million youth members, and more than 1.2 million adult volunteers, currently participate. Generations of Americans (more than 110 million youths since the Boy Scouts were founded in 1910) have participated in scouting.
In 1916, the U.S. Congress issued a special charter to the Boy Scouts in recognition of their public service during World War I. Nearly 40 million copies of The Boy Scouts Handbook have been printed since 1911, making it one of the most popular books of all time. Eight sitting U.S. Senators, 13 Representatives, and countless other distinguished Americans are former Eagle Scouts. More than half of the current Congress participated in scouting, and many still do, as adult volunteers and leaders. It is ludicrous to depict the Boy Scouts as disreputable or out of the mainstream.
Second, the ongoing assault on the Boy Scouts is inspired solely by an agenda-driven and content-based disagreement with the group’s core values, and in particular with the Boy Scouts’ exercise of its constitutional right to exclude homosexual adult leaders. Under any other circumstances, the attempt to punish—and suppress—a group for its legitimate constitutional rights would be viewed as vindictive or even oppressive. But a double standard is at work.
Throughout the 1990’s, gays, atheists, and the ACLU brought a series of highly-publicized but ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits against the Boy Scouts. Despite losing all of these lawsuits, including the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, which recognized the Boy Scouts’ rights of free association and expression, liberal groups press the fight in other quarters. These “sore losers” are on a mission to destroy the Boy Scouts.
The latest attack on the Boy Scouts comes from the bar associations for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Santa Clara counties, which have petitioned the California Supreme Court to revise the ethical rules governing California’s 1,600 state court judges to prohibit them from belonging to the Boy Scouts. If this outrageous proposal is adopted, a state judge would violate the Code of Judicial Ethics—and be subject to censure or removal from office—by membership (or active participation) in the Boy Scouts. This is a third flaw in the latest attack on the Boy Scouts, for in 1998 the California Supreme Court presaged Dale and ruled that the Boy Scouts’ exclusion of members and leaders who do not share its moral beliefs did not violate the state’s civil rights statute, the so-called Unruh Act. In other words, the California Supreme Court has already decided that the Boy Scouts do not impermissibly discriminate.
Fourth, and finally, the purported justification for blacklisting the Boy Scouts is legally baseless, bordering on frivolous. Lawyer groups should know better. Canon 2 of the Code of Judicial Ethics provides that “[a] judge shall not hold membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation.” Acknowledging that Canon 2 would literally forbid judges to belong to religious and military organizations, the ethics rules specifically exempt such membership, as well as “membership in a nonprofit youth organization,” in order to “accommodate individual rights of intimate association and free expression.” The anti-Boy Scouts bar groups want to repeal the exception, which was created to protect judges’ freedom of association and expression, in order to make the group off-limits for state court judges.
The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that the Boys Scouts—and adult members who happen to be judges—have a constitutional right of expressive association. The proposed blacklist would abridge that right. To even entertain blacklisting the Boy Scouts, in the face of Dale, demonstrates an appalling contempt for the Boy Scouts’ First Amendment rights.
The California Supreme Court should emphatically reject the misguided blacklisting proposal.
San Diego attorney Mark S. Pulliam is a member of Pacific Legal Foundation’s Board of Trustees. This commentary is adopted from a longer article that appears in the March 2003 issue of the California Political Review, for which Mr. Pulliam serves as legal editor.
Main Entry: 1black·list
Pronunciation: -"list
Function: noun
Date: circa 1619
: a list of persons who are disapproved of or are to be punished or boycotted
And the BSA are being punished...just how?
You didn't read the article?
"In California, several local bar associations are seeking to ostracize the Boy Scouts by prohibiting state court judges from participating in the organization..."
I want to know why such a superior intellectual being would even want to associate with such idiots as the Bible-thumping scouts then. Really, it sounds like such a kid would be so much better off then having to learn a bunch of religious-based ethics.
There's no requirement in the BSA to be a Christian, or have read, discussed, or even touched a Bible.
I would pose that question to the judges who are currently involved in the BSA in some capacity and see what they consider it to be.
I do not know what else you could call it.
It puts the BSA in the same bucket as a communist organization.
This is an election-year grand-stand stunt with zero chance of succeeding. It's just another attempt to divide and conquer, and divert people from focusing on voting out the democRats. Ignore it. (But join the BSA and get a bumper sticker post-haste.)
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