Landmark Case Pits Gay Officer Against Boy Scouts : Civil rights: The fired San Diego troop leader’s suit is the first to invoke new state law that outlaws job discrimination against homosexuals.

Suddenly this conservative and often strait-laced city is center stage in the clash between gay rights and the Boy Scouts of America.

It began last summer when a police officer from suburban El Cajon was dismissed as a Boy Scout leader when it was learned he is gay. The national policy of the Boy Scouts prohibits gays from being Scout leaders on the belief that gays are inappropriate role models.

In rapid-fire order, the dispute over the Boy Scouts’ dismissal of Officer Chuck Merino spread to the San Diego Police Department, the San Diego City Council, the County Sheriff’s Department, United Way and now the San Diego school board, which on Tuesday will debate whether to boot the Boy Scouts off school property because of the group’s anti-gay policy.

Key to the civic tumult is Merino’s lawsuit against the Boy Scouts to regain his volunteer role with the Explorer Post that he organized.

Although there have been other lawsuits against the Boy Scouts’ policy, Merino’s suit could have statewide, even national, effect because it is the first to invoke the California law that, effective Jan. 1, outlaws job discrimination against homosexuals.

Merino said he never meant to be the catalyst of an emotional dispute that has split the community. “A lot of my concerns are for my rights and if that turns out to be gay rights, so be it,” he said.

On the other side, the head of the local Boy Scouts Council accuses Merino and his supporters of “holding 40,000 Boy Scouts and their families hostage so they can pursue their own political aims in furthering their lifestyle.”

Soon after Merino was dismissed, the San Diego Police Department responded by severing ties with the Boy Scouts, citing a city ordinance that bans discrimination against gays.

Gay activists, led by Queer Nation/San Diego, have repeatedly demanded that the City Council remove the Boy Scouts from city property in Balboa Park and the Fiesta Island portion of the Mission Bay aquatic park. The council has refused to respond to the demands, with most council members hoping that the politically explosive issue will go away quietly, which it shows no signs of doing.

In the latest skirmish, the San Diego school board is scheduled Tuesday to debate whether to ban the Boy Scouts from using school grounds for a program that reaches 3,000 teen-age boys, many of them in inner-city, low-income schools.

Boy Scouts officials, at first stunned and put on the defensive by the controversy, have begun a counteroffensive, attempting to rally Boy Scout parents and to remind the press and public of the good deeds done by Scouting. One of the area’s better-known public relations specialists is aiding the cause.

A hastily arranged “Tribute to Scouting” rally three days after Christmas drew a cheering crowd of 700, including a county supervisor and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado). More rallies are planned, and Scouting boosters have been urged to pepper school officials throughout the county with letters and phone calls to forestall any attempts to remove Scouting from school property in other districts.

“Somebody has to stand up and be counted,” said Louis J. Garday, chairman of the Boy Scouts’ San Diego County Council, which oversees Scouting in San Diego and Imperial counties.

Garday argues that if the schools oust the Boy Scouts, it will hurt the boys who most need the kind of guidance that only Scouting can provide: boys without fathers, boys drawn to the streets and the lure of drugs and gangs.

Supt. Tom Payzant, a former Scout and former board member of the Boy Scouts Council, said his mail is running 3 to 1 against his recommendation that the Scouts no longer be allowed to run school-day programs in 11 schools.

“I support what the Boy Scouts stand for,” he said, “but what I can’t accept is the underlying assumption that if somebody is gay or lesbian, then there is a greater chance of irresponsibility in terms of improper behavior toward young people.”

Garday responds that Payzant and the school board should wait until the courts resolve the issue of whether the Boy Scouts have the right to ban gays as volunteer leaders.

That argument proved persuasive with the San Diego chapter of United Way, which provides about $400,000 a year to the Boy Scouts. The chapter had been petitioned by gay activists to follow the example of United Way in the San Francisco Bay Area and cut off funding to the Boy Scouts until the anti-gay policy is dropped.

The San Diego United Way board declined. “The Scouts have not had an opportunity to defend themselves,” said John Liarakos, vice president of United Way in San Diego. “We feel it would be inappropriate to take any action at this point before the courts decide.”

Merino’s court case will follow a 1991 decision by an Orange County Superior Court that ruled in favor of the Boy Scouts in a similar controversy. Key legal points include whether a nonprofit group such as the Boy Scouts should be treated differently than a business organization and whether an unpaid post such as that held by Merino deserves the same anti-discrimination protection as a full-time, paid job.

The controversy has split local law enforcement. San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen, a former Scouting board member, cut the 25-year-old ties between his department and the Scouts, likening the anti-gay policy to the old Jim Crow policies of the South.

In contrast, County Sheriff Jim Roache, who is an elected official, decided not to cut Scouting adrift. His undersheriff, Jay LaSeur, was among the organizers of the “Tribute to Scouting” rally.

Not surprisingly, the issue has galvanized the San Diego’s gay community, which is growing in political clout. Michael Portantino, publisher of San Diego’s Gay & Lesbian Times newspaper, said the Boy Scouts, in rallying public support, are fanning bigoted notions of gays as sexual predators.

“It’s easy to build fear around the idea of homosexuals trying to take control of our kids and teach them homosexual behavior,” Portantino said.

Garday, president of a real estate investment trust company, denies that the Boy Scouts’ policy is homophobic. He notes that the Boy Scouts do not discriminate against gays in hiring staff members, only in selecting leaders for “boys who are of an impressionable age.”

“There is no gay-bashing going on in Scouting,” Garday said. “We teach boys to respect people. The alternative lifestyle community is one the boys should respect, but they don’t necessarily have to look to it for role models.”

Despite the controversy swirling around him, the 37-year-old Merino, a 15-year veteran of the El Cajon Police Department who started an Explorers Post with the Scouts in 1988, remains soft-spoken but determined. He has given few interviews.

Although Merino’s police chief had long known that Merino is gay, Scouting officials only learned of his sexual orientation after he mentioned it while off duty and attending a community meeting in Hillcrest, the San Diego neighborhood where he lives.

The meeting had been called to discuss a series of gay-bashing attacks in Hillcrest, a center of San Diego’s gay community. Merino was part of a neighborhood patrol organized to deter those attacks and, in that context, mentioned that he is gay.

How word of Merino’s low-key comment got to the Scouting hierarchy is unclear. But without so much as questioning him, the Scouts sent a letter to Merino immediately banning him from any role with the Explorers.

“I think Scouts are doing a fantastic thing for the youth of America,” Merino said. “But a lot of the policy-makers at the national level have policies that date back to the 1920s. It’s time for them to join mainstream America.”