Boy Scouts: how many decades behind the Pentagon?

Well, they were being thwapped on the hands by their corporate sponsors before this for being anti-gay. This was always going to be a struggle between conservative and less conservative forces within scouting.

Yes. It is still frustrating, though. How much would Boy Scouting suffer if they dropped religious backing? I know, probably too much to consider.

Let's not make too much of this based on the story. Two of the quotes came from people affiliated with the Southern Baptists, and the guy from the Great Salt Lake Council is probably talking about the Mormon church. I doubt the United Methodist Church is going to drop troops because of this.

Ah, yeah - here's the Fox News story about this. It's kinda much ado about nothing.

It's really all about the sponsors. They are being pulled one way by some big corporate sponsors and then another by the sponsors at the bottom level that tilt heavily towards conservative religious groups. I think this goes in well with other news items where the rights of faith groups to impose their "it's not hating the person it's hating the lifestyle/act/etc" bigotry outside of membership in their congregation or clergy is effectively redefined as freedom of religion.

EDIT: saw Anders' post. What he said.

The problem with the big church organisations from the Scouts' perspective is also that they're large and organised enough that they can relatively quickly get an alternative organisation up and running to create a "Christian" alternative.

I think the biggest problem is that the Scouting leadership is onboard with LGBT bigotry and looking to furiously displace their coverup of sexual abuse in the direction of failures to exclude gays. But they really want the big corporate dollars, so they are trying to provide plausible deniability to corporations without actually making concessions.

Either way, atheists are still going to be banned, and I have a feeling that if they do unban gay scouts (which they absolutely should) the wind will be out of the sails for getting them to move any further.

The Boy Scouts voted to allow openly gay scouts.

No change on the ban against gay scout leaders (it wasn't on the ballot). No word on atheists. An important step in the process, but they still have a ways to go.

ETA: The BSA leadership left it up to a local scout leader vote and there was a solid margin: