Scouts Can Bar Gay Man as Leader, Judge Rules : Civil rights: She says compelling youth organization to accept homosexuals would violate 1st Amendment.

The Boy Scouts of America has a constitutional right to reject avowed homosexuals as Scoutmasters, a judge ruled Tuesday.

To compel the Scouts to accept openly gay troop leaders would violate the organization’s 1st Amendment right to express its belief that homosexuality is immoral, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Sally G. Disco ruled.

Disco struck down the heart of a case filed 11 years ago by a former Bay Area Eagle Scout after he was refused acceptance as a leader on the grounds that he talked about his homosexuality in a newspaper article. The plaintiff, Timothy Curran, is now a Los Angeles videotape editor. Curran said late Tuesday that he was disappointed, but hopes to appeal.

“I will not give up my fight to have the same kind of opportunities as everyone else in this country and not be judged differently because of whom I love,” Curran told United Press International.

The ruling, while applying only to the Mt. Diablo Council of the Scouts in the Bay Area, which turned down Curran, suggests the national organization has the right to exclude homosexuals from among its 1.1 million adult volunteers.

“We very much felt organizationally that as a private membership group, we have the right to establish and maintain qualifications for membership,” said Blake Lewis, national spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America. “Today’s decision reinforces that belief.”

The decision prompted outrage from gay rights groups.

“This is nothing but irrational,” said Torie Osborne, executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. “It reinforces a false stereotype that gay men or lesbians can’t be positive role models to kids. It sends a horrifying message to kids that it’s OK to hate gays and lesbians. . . . The notion that it’s OK for a major institution to discriminate is horrendous.”

Jon Davidson, senior staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Curran, said he found the decision “wrong, both legally and morally.”

“If the Boy Scouts claimed to espouse anti-Semitism, would that excuse exclusion of all Jewish Scoutmasters?” Davidson asked. “If they stated that they believed that blacks were inferior, would they have a ‘right’ to practice discrimination against African-Americans?”

Curran was an exemplary Scout, according to evidence presented at trial. He was refused membership after he reaffirmed his homosexual lifestyle to a Scout official. When he testified in Los Angeles at 28, he raised his hand and repeated from memory the Boy Scout pledge to keep himself “physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”

“Morally straight,” the Boy Scouts argued during the trial, means, among other things, that a person not be homosexual.

“Since 1910, when the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated . . . it was clearly understood that homosexuality was an immoral behavior and had no place in Scouting for youth or leaders,” a Scout spokesman testified at trial.

Curran’s attorneys were surprised by Disco’s ruling because the judge had made a preliminary ruling in favor of their client. In a November ruling, Disco accepted Curran’s contention that the Scouts should be considered a business under the Unruh Act, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination.

“The Boy Scouts stand for what is best in American values,” she wrote, quoting an argument by the plaintiff’s attorneys. “To find that no legal principle requires that it not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, physical disability, sexual orientation . . . would send a stark message about what the ideals of this country really mean.”

However, in her ruling Tuesday, the judge determined that the group’s 1st Amendment right to freedom of expression took precedence over state law.

“Inclusion of a homosexual Scoutmaster who has publicly acknowledged his or her homosexuality would either undermine the force of the Boy Scout view that homosexuality is immoral and inconsistent with the Scout oath and law, or would undermine the credibility of the Scoutmaster who attempts to communicate that view,” Disco ruled.