The Boy Scouts' new policy allowing openly gay members will fall to aggressive gay rights activists if not first to its own incoherence.

The Boy Scouts' Doomed Compromise

by Carson Holloway

Carson Holloway argues that the Boy Scouts' new policy on gay members 

and leaders is an incoherent compromise that won't long withstand 

challenges from gay rights activists.

On May 23, delegates representing the Boy Scouts of America voted to adopt a change in their membership policies. For many years, the Scouts held that homosexual activity was inconsistent with the spirit of scouting and that therefore openly gay people could not be admitted to the organization. This will no longer be the case.

The change the delegates voted for is a compromise of sorts. For the last decade and a half, liberal activists have sought a complete repudiation of the ban. During the same period traditionalists have sought to retain it. The new policy appears to split the difference: It permits openly homosexual boys to be members of the Scouts, but it does not allow openly homosexual men to be Scout leaders.

Whatever else one thinks about the new policy, this much is certain: It can't last. No doubt many of the delegates thought they would be buying peace and quiet by enacting this compromise, but they are bound to be disappointed.

The compromise policy's short life is predictable, in the first place, in light of the kind of people it is meant to placate, people that the Scout delegates have seriously misjudged. Socially liberal political activists don't believe in compromise. They believe in winning.

If they believed in compromise, there would be no constitutional "right" to abortion, but a variety of more or less permissive abortion regimes across the states. If they believed in compromise, there would be no legal crusade for same-sex marriage, but a willingness to accept same-sex civil unions.

Indeed, proponents of gay-friendly scouting, the very activists whose demands the present compromise is meant to satisfy, have already proclaimed that the fight will go on: The next goal is to open the Scouts to openly homosexual Scout leaders.

The new policy's eventual doom, however, is ordained not only by the incorrigible aggressiveness of American social liberals, who cannot bear to see any traditional institution untransformed according to their own vision of the good, but also by its own incoherence.

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