Boy Scouts expected to end ban on gay scout leaders

The Boy Scouts of America is expected on Monday to officially end its longstanding ban on gay scout leaders — but the new policy won't prevent church-led scout groups from choosing adult leaders "whose beliefs are consistent with their own," the group said.

The Boy Scouts' 17-member executive committee earlier this month unanimously approved a resolution that would end a blanket ban on gay adult leaders and let individual scout units set their own policy on the long-divisive issue. The change will become official policy if it's ratified by the organization's 80-member board, which is expected to vote Monday.

During the Boy Scouts' annual meeting last May, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, now the organization's national president, said events of the past year "have confronted us with urgent challenges I did not foresee and which we cannot ignore." He said those include growing challenges to the policy from Boy Scout councils in New York and Colorado, as well as new state laws and court decisions barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The Boy Scouts, he said, "finds itself in an unsustainable position" regarding the ban.

"I must speak as plainly and bluntly to you as I spoke to presidents when I was director of CIA and secretary of defense," Gates told the scout leaders. "We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. The status quo in our movement's membership standards cannot be sustained."

While revoking charters of councils that allowed gay leaders would be allowed under the current policy, he said, "such an action would deny the lifelong benefits of scouting to hundreds of thousands of boys and young men today and vastly more in the future. I will not take that path."

The ban on gay adults saw its first major challenge last April, when the first openly gay adult was hired as a summer camp leader by the Greater New York Council of Boy Scouts.

Before the committee vote earlier this summer, corporate sponsors such as Lockheed Martin and Intel had dropped funding in protest of policies considered discriminatory, Religion News Service reported.

Membership in the Boy Scouts of America has steadily declined in the past decade, but the 2013 decision to allow gay youth contributed to a steeper drop of 7.4% from 2013 to 2014, according to organization figures.

The Irving, Texas-based Boy Scouts lifted its ban on gay youth in 2013. The selection last year of Gates as president was seen as an opportunity to revisit the policy on adult leaders. As secretary of defense, Gates helped end the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that barred openly gay individuals from serving in the military.