Road to Tolerance, With Detours

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday permitting the Boy Scouts to exclude openly gay Scoutmasters comes at an interesting moment in a meandering national journey toward social tolerance of homosexuals.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said that forcing the Scouts to accept gay leaders would violate the organization’s rights of free speech and free association.

By upholding the Scouts’ right to define homosexual conduct as “not morally straight,” the court is implicitly endorsing the view that homosexuality is inherently inconsistent with the values and pledges the Scouts teach young boys. Both the court and the Boy Scouts are engaging in narrow, tortured logic and ultimately are being disingenuous by suggesting the case was about homosexual conduct. It was not. The Scout leader in question was dismissed because he merely announced he was gay.

In California this week Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill barring the exclusion of gays from juries because of their sexual orientation. “That kind of discrimination is wrong,” Davis said, “It violates America’s notion of justice and fair play.”

He’s right. New opinion surveys, including one this month by the Los Angeles Times Poll, find Americans becoming more convinced that gays need stronger legal protection. A Gallup poll last year found that a robust majority supports hiring gays and lesbians as teachers. Even so, Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 22 last March, which barred the state from recognizing same-sex marriages.

The brutal 1998 killing of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming gay man, along with the fatal bludgeoning of an Army private rumored to be gay, has raised awareness of anti-gay violence nationally. Last week, in fact, the U.S. Senate approved legislation expanding the list of federal hate crimes to include violence motivated by a victim’s sexual orientation. The measure faces tough going in the House. The path to tolerance is a slow and halting one.