BASHING THE BOY SCOUTS

From the WSJ Editorial Page
Friday, November 26, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Legal historians may someday explain how the once-great American Civil Liberties Union came to see the Boy Scouts as public enemy number one. In the meantime, the ACLU keeps on bringing its absurd First Amendment challenges against the Scouts. The Defense Department is the latest defendant to throw in the towel.

The issue this time is the status of Scout troops on military bases. Most troops have institutional sponsors, and the military has traditionally performed this function for troops on bases, especially overseas where other options aren't readily available. The ACLU claims this is religious discrimination because the Boy Scouts require members to believe in God.

That argument received a boost last week when the Defense Department agreed to issue an all-points reminder that official sponsorship of Boy Scout troops is against departmental rules. The edict is unlikely to have much practical effect, since most troops can continue under private sponsorship. But the PR effect is immense. Defense admitted no guilt--a subtlety that went mostly unnoticed in the media rush to report the ACLU's "victory."

If all this weren't silly enough, another part of the ACLU lawsuit uses the same church-state argument to object to the famous Boy Scout Jamboree, held since 1981 at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. This time the military is willing to fight the charges, which eventually will be decided by a federal court in Illinois. The Scouts receive no direct financial support from the Army for the Jamboree--though the ACLU contends there are indirect costs involved.

But so what? The military earns a lot of public goodwill and A.P. Hill's soldiers learn a thing or two in helping to put up a temporary city and police 35,000 energetic teenage males. The Army even comes out ahead financially. The Scouts expect to spend $29 million on next year's Jamboree--and that's on top of the $12 million or more that they've already put into the base's permanent infrastructure. The military and other civilian groups make use of those facilities when the Scouts aren't there, which is all but nine days every four years.





Ever since the Supreme Court upheld the Scouts' First Amendment right to bar Scoutmasters who are openly gay, the ACLU has looked for softer targets. The suit against the military is one of a series aimed at getting communities to deny access to public facilities. The original lawsuit also challenged the city of Chicago's sponsorship of troops in public schools, another venue where sponsors aren't always easy to find. The city settled.
In Connecticut the ACLU has succeeded in getting the state to remove the Scouts from the list of charitable institutions to which public employees may make voluntary contributions. And earlier this year it settled a suit against the city of San Diego, which agreed to evict the Scouts from a public park they have been using since 1918. The Scouts countersued, lost, and the case is now on appeal before the Ninth Circuit.

The question no one seems to be asking is, who's better off as a result of these lawsuits? Surely not the 3.2 million Boy Scouts, whose venerable organization is part of the web of voluntary associations once considered the bedrock of American life. If anything, the purpose of the ACLU attacks is to paint Scouts as religious bigots. Other losers are communities themselves, which are forced to sever ties to an organization that helps to build character in young men.

It's been 20 years since the ACLU brought its first suit against the Scouts. If there's one thing we've learned by now, it's that the ACLU offensive says more about the degraded status of the civil liberties group than it does about the Boy Scouts.