Donors across the country have suspended giving to the Boy Scouts of America in anticipation of a national vote this month on a controversial proposal to ease the organization’s anti-gay membership policies.
The proposal, which would lift the ban on gay scouts but leave intact the exclusion of gay leaders, comes after years of protests and recent surveys that found a majority of corporate sponsors are against the organization’s current membership policies, while foundations and major donors are split on it.
Scouting officials, donors, advocacy groups, and observers of the long-running debate over whether the 103-year-old group should allow openly gay kids and adults in its ranks, say gifts totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake with both the vote and the continuing controversy over the way the charity is dealing with the issue.
“This is a battle the Boy Scouts have been in since the 1970s,” says Paul Strunk, a college fundraiser who wrote an academic thesis on the membership policies of the Boy Scouts. “They’re probably going to leave money on the table either way—either the conservatives or the liberals will pull out their dollars—but it’s time to finally deal with the issue.”
Among the donations to the Boy Scouts on hold until this month’s vote:
- A $20,000 check to the Golden Spread Council, a local Scouts group in Amarillo, Tex., sits on the desk of a donor, who, a Scouts official says, plans to send it along only if the Boy Scouts rejects the new proposal.
- The Xcel Energy Foundation, which last year gave more than $75,000 to Scouts groups in some of the states where the company works, will review grant requests from the Scouts sometime after the vote, taking into account Xcel Energy’s corporate policy barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.
- The United Way of the National Capital Area, in Washington, which since 2008 has contributed more than $1-million to its local Scouts council, may consider new rules of its own this year making nonprofits that discriminate ineligible for grants.
“We still think scouting is important to this community, but they need to end this ban on gays, not just for scouts, but for leaders, too,” says Bill Hanbury, chief executive of Washington’s United Way. “We’ve been in touch with the Boy Scouts and their leadership because we want them to know what we think is the right thing to do.”
But whether the Boy Scouts or his organization changes its rules, Mr. Hanbury says, United Way donors can vote with their feet.
All of the money that the United Way of the National Capital Area gives to the Boy Scouts each year comes from gifts donors earmark for the charity.
“Donors will self-select out of supporting them if they don’t like the environment—either the way it is now or if the proposal passes,” he says.
Boy Scouts of America’s national office said in an e-mail that it is “thankful for the generous support of those who continue to support the organization” and that it “cannot accurately specify” how many gifts the Boy Scouts may or may not receive “as a result of a single issue.”
A Rocky Past
In the past, the divisive issue has sparked protests and caused the Boy Scouts to lose some of its support.
In the years leading up to and immediately following the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the organization’s right to bar gays, for example, some government agencies and public schools dropped their sponsorship of local Scout troops, and some companies and local United Ways ended their support.
Such protests gained momentum again last summer when the Boy Scouts announced a decision after a two-year review to reaffirm its no-gays rule—a move that appeared to have strong backing from conservative religious denominations, which, along with other religious groups, sponsor seven out of 10 scouting troops around the country.
But gay-rights groups, including those organized by gay former scouts and their allies, howled. In the wake of those protests, more supporters, including companies like UPS and Intel, made public pronouncements that they were suspending gifts.
The Boy Scouts changed course in January, saying it would instead consider giving local Scouts units the option to choose for themselves whether to admit gay scouts or leaders. But the national organization soon abandoned that idea, too, in the face of intense pressure from both inside and outside the group.
Last month the Boy Scouts unveiled the proposal that will be voted on in mid-May by about 1,400 delegates to a national meeting in Texas. Apparently meant to strike a middle ground by admitting gay youths but continuing to exclude openly homosexual adults, the proposal has appeased some but angered others.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the biggest operator of scouting troops by far—accounting for about one-third of the more than 100,000 troops around the country —released a statement last month signaling at least tepid support for the proposal.
Noting that while the Mormon church did not launch “any campaign either to effect or prevent a policy change,” it is “satisfied that BSA has made a thoughtful, good-faith effort” to deal with challenging issues.
‘An Exodus’
Other conservative supporters expressed deep concerns.
John Stemberger, a former scout and scout leader who started a group, OnMyHonor.net, this year to urge the Boy Scouts to maintain its prohibition against gays, calls the proposal “a disaster” that will “literally gut the human and financial capital” of the organization.
“If it passes, there will be an exodus of conservative-minded people over a couple years,” Mr. Stemberger says. “Those charter units; those moms and dads, those donors, they will be gone.”
Advocates on the other side of the debate see problems with the new proposal, too, saying it doesn’t go far enough to include eliminating the ban on gay adults.
Rich Ferraro, a spokesman for the gay-rights group GLAAD, says in a written statement, that with the proposed policy change, the Boy Scouts “missed an opportunity to ... usher the organization back to relevancy” and that because of that failure, the group “will continue to see a decline in both membership and donations.”
A ‘Listening Exercise’
Before announcing the proposal, the Boy Scouts embarked on what it calls in a written statement “the most comprehensive listening exercise in its history” to gauge the potential impact of change.
It held 250 town-hall style meetings nationwide and in February started a series of surveys that, it says, reached more than 200,000 members and leaders, about 270 local councils, and more than 50,000 alumni and donors.
Key findings of the studies reported on the group’s Web site:
- While a majority of adults involved with scouting support the current policy of excluding openly gay people, younger parents and teens tend to oppose the policy.
- Religious organizations that sponsor scout troops estimated that if the Boy Scouts started including both gay youths and adults, membership could drop by up to 350,000. A change to include gay youths only, however, would be “consistent with the religious beliefs” of the sponsoring groups.
- Local councils say that on average 51 percent of their major donors support the membership status quo, while a third support a change.
- A majority of corporations that contribute to the Boy Scouts or have done so in the past—and a majority of the Fortune 500 companies surveyed—do not support the organization’s current policy.
“Even with the wide range of input,” the statement says, “it is extremely difficult to accurately quantify the potential impact of maintaining or changing the current policy.” But, it continues, participants in the surveys did “tend to agree that youth should not be denied the benefits of scouting.”
Staying Focused
Participation in the Boy Scouts has been on the decline recently, dropping about 15 percent to 2.8 million members from 2000 to last year.
During roughly the same time period, financial information the Boy Scouts has reported to The Chronicle—consolidated to include its national affiliates, like Learning for Life, and its many local councils—shows donations have been on the rise.
The $394-million the Boy Scouts reported in private donations for 2011, the most recent data available, represented a nearly 7 percent inflation-adjusted increase over a decade earlier.
In its e-mail response to The Chronicle’s questions about donor support and the potential policy change, the Boy Scouts said that through the review process, it has “continued to stay focused on that which unites us, reaching and serving young people.”
Matt Hugg, a former local Scouts official who is now a fundraising consultant in Pennsylvania, says that kind of focus is exactly what the Boy Scouts needs as it juggles an emotionally sensitive issue.
“It can’t possibly please everyone on this, so it should be just communicating with donors and educating them on where things are and why,” he says. “The message has to be that their support for the Boy Scouts, no matter what, is for the kids.”
Boy Scouts’ Membership Policy: What Might Change
Following is from the Boy Scouts of America’s current membership policy:
While the BSA does not proactively inquire about the sexual orientation of employees, volunteers, or members, we do not grant membership to individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals or who engage in behavior that would become a distraction to the mission of the BSA.
A key part of the new policy that its 1,400 national delegates have been asked to vote on:
No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.
How Private Donations to the Boy Scouts Have Fared
