| David Vest | |||
| What is the Boy Scouts’ Message? | |||
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The Supreme Court has “narrowly”
(was ever word more fitting?) upheld the right of the Boy
Scouts of America to bar gay people from participation on
the ground that to compel the organization to accept gays
“would derogate from the organization's expressive
message." The Court could not have said it more plainly: the Boy Scouts’ “expressive message” is one of bigotry and hatefulness, but the organization has the right to express that message regardless of “public or judicial disapproval,” as the Court daintily put it, in the tone of voice normally used while holding a dead rat by the tail with a gloved hand. As Justice John Paul Stevens observed in dissent, the tenet of organizational expression at question is nowhere actually or explicitly expressed in the Boy Scouts’ law or in their oath. So the message of BSA scouting is not anything anyone actually came right out and said, at least not in writing, with their name on it. It is a message expressed not in official language but in the organization’s behavior – its institutional history of heterosexism, homophobia and discrimination. Justice Stevens also reminded the Court that the oft-quoted precept that Scouts should be “morally straight and clean” has nothing whatever to do with homosexuality – a fact that is, he wrote, “plain as the light of day.” Less plain, and left unresolved by the Court, is the delicate question of how hate speech can be “morally clean and straight.” For hate speech, plain and simple, is what we are talking about. By a 5-4 margin, the Court has merely ruled that the BSA have the same constitutional rights as the Ku Klux Klan. (The Boy Scouts argue that their mission is “providing character-building experiences for young people”; in a Mississippi courtroom a Klansman argued that the KKK’s mission is to provide “food baskets for the rural poor.”) Institutionalized hate speech should be clearly labeled for what it is by anyone with the consciousness (and conscience) to recognize it, whether it be American scouting's hatred of gays, the Klan’s hatred of Jews, African-Americans or Catholics, or the Southern Baptist Convention’s hatred of women (who, the Southern Baptists opine, are unfit for the ministry and should be “submissive” to men – proving the adage that going to church makes one a Christian in the same proportion as visiting the garage makes one a mechanic). If behavior is speech, is lynching speech? Is cross-burning speech? Witch-burning? Wife-beating (the ultimate basis of "submission")? Does the Klan have a constitutional right to ban Jews from its cross-burning ceremonies? Is puking speech? Yes, the Klan has the right to its opinion, but its opinion is hateful. Now, thanks to the Court, the same can be said of the Boy Scouts. And who paid for this dubious right? James Dale paid. He made himself into an Eagle Scout and then got thrown out when the BSA learned he was gay. Billy Jack Gaither paid. He suffered the expressive behavior of being beaten to death in Alabama by men with similar views on gays. Matthew Sheppard paid. He paid dearly for his killers' right to hear hate speech about gays. (No one, however, heard his cries for help.) Why should anyone who’s neither gay nor a bigot care about all this, one way or the other? I guess you could express that in different ways. You could say, for example, that whatever you do to the least of my brothers you do to me. You could say, if my sister’s not welcome in that church, neither am I. You get the idea. Or we could all simply say that, after today, to belong to the Boy Scouts would derogate from America’s expressive message. |
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