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:

Should we be concerned about the presence of that weasel word, or do we think that's just an unfortunate oversight?

That weasel word jumped out at me too, but I'm not sure that the BSA leadership can just go around a 61% vote without (rightfully) getting called out pretty hard by their own people. Which may happen anyways. What really grinds my gears on this is that an organization that prides itself on teaching leadership abdicated responsibility for this decision and left it up to popular vote.

On a brighter note, I would expect allowing gay scouts in to eviscerate any legal argument they have to keep gay scout leaders out. I'd think 17 year old gay Eagle scout OKAY, 18 year old gay Eagle scout NOT OKAY is going to be a very hard sell to a judge (IANAL).

I'm just thrilled by movement on this front as I've got one very important reason to want the BSA in a much better place policy-wise in about, oh, 6 years.

I would expect that you will see some troops end their affiliation with the BSA and start their own organization or independent groups. So many troops are run by churches that there are bound to be some that refuse to accept this vote.

I predict that the BSA splits into the Official BSA and the Provisional BSA, with further splinters of the Provos into the Continuity BSA and the Real BSA.