Ballot Initiative Praising Scouts Is Latest Salvo in Heated Debate

Michael Warnken knows what it’s like to be a troubled kid.

He fought constantly in high school, spent time in juvenile hall and was sent to boarding school after punching out his dad.

Children who are like he was need guidance, he said. That’s why the 26-year-old real estate agent launched a campaign for an unorthodox ballot measure praising the Boy Scouts for their work with young people and voiding a county resolution that criticized their anti-gay policies.

Giving the organization a pat on the back might seem an odd purpose for a ballot measure. But in Santa Barbara, it’s just the latest twist in a divisive social debate that has roiled this usually relaxed, postcard-ready county for more than a year.

Since the leader of the local Boy Scout council dropped a bombshell at a public meeting by announcing that he was gay, the county has been split along a fault line between tolerance and support for so-called traditional values.

The high--or low--points of the nasty controversy include the firing of the Scout leader, the revocation of a lease on a clubhouse the Scouts had used for 70 years, and the passage of a resolution by the Board of Supervisors condemning the Scouts for their anti-gay policies. Scouts were even booed at the annual Santa Barbara Christmas Parade.

“There are obviously some very strong feelings,” said Bob Smith, manager of the county’s election division.

The hard-charging Warnken and his band of volunteers struck back last week, turning in 20,500 signatures--far more than the 12,364 needed--to place his initiative on the March ballot.

The wording states: “The proposed initiative praises the Boy Scouts of America and its service to the youth of Santa Barbara County. . . . It also declares that County Board of Supervisors Resolution 01-76 (disapproving BSA’s discrimination against gay members and leaders) contradicts the will of the people of Santa Barbara County.”

If nothing else, it was a stunning achievement for a grass-roots campaign funded with hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.

“This is one of the few times [in a local initiative campaign] that professionals were not involved,” said Mike Stoker, a former county supervisor.

He predicts a much harder-fought campaign in the winter if election officials certify the signatures as valid.

David Tate, executive director of the Scouts’ Los Padres Council, representing Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, said the organization cannot endorse or oppose political initiatives.

But, he said, “we’re happy citizens want to do this on our behalf.”

Warnken’s initiative has become a topic of conversation around town and on radio, elevating the profile of the onetime bad kid. Some praise him for standing up to what they call liberal buttinskys who run county government in Santa Barbara.

Others have called and cussed him out, implying that he’s a throwback to the time when police burst into gay bars and hauled the customers off to jail.

“I think he is misinformed,” said Janet Stanley, a spokeswoman for the Pacific Pride Foundation, an umbrella gay rights group. “He is spending time and energy that could be better spent bringing the community together.”

Warnken insists that he’s not prejudiced against gays. He’s also not particularly religious, and he never even joined the Scouts. He just thinks they deserve a vote of confidence.

“When I was in juvenile hall, I met people who could use a program like the Boy Scouts,” he said.

People who grow up the way he did are not supposed to wind up in the sort of trouble he found. He was raised on a farm near Dixon, not far from Sacramento. He milked cows, ate steak and potatoes for dinner, and slept in a safe bed every night. “I’m cornfed; all I knew was the farm,” he said. “I was also completely depressed.”

He doesn’t talk about the cause of the depression, but admits that he and his parents had problems. After being sent to boarding school, he ran away to a town in western Massachusetts, Pittsfield.

“A lot of people say they had nothing,” he said. “All I had was a pair of underwear and a jumpsuit.”

He moved into a YMCA and, once on his own, began turning his life around. Now he is working his way through college, majoring in economics and philosophy, with an emphasis on ethics and public policy. His hours are consumed by work and study.

“I am totally driven,” he said. And he sounds like it. His words sometimes spill out in an excited jumble. His passions are so strong that his voice tends to rise by decibels when he discusses something he cares about.

Warnken describes himself as a libertarian. His interest in politics didn’t go much beyond posting signs in Isla Vista for Stoker’s unsuccessful congressional campaign last year.

That all changed a few months ago, when he heard about a notorious assault on an Isla Vista resident. Alcohol was forced down the young man’s throat, and then he was raped as a crowd watched. The whole scene was videotaped.

“Only one person came forward,” Warnken said disgustedly. “This is a catastrophe.”

Several people have been arrested in the case, but the incident fed Warnken’s growing belief that young people were adrift and needed organizations such as the Boy Scouts. Yet the Scouts had fallen under a cloud.

The local version of the national debate came to a head at a public meeting of the Board of Supervisors last October. Leonard Lanzi, then head of the Los Padres Boy Scout Council, testified in favor of continuing a lease at a carriage house in Montecito that had long been used exclusively by the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.

After the U.S. Supreme Court said last year that the Scouts had the right to exclude gays, the board was considering scrapping the lease and opening the Scout house to other groups.

Lanzi argued that people who don’t share Scout beliefs don’t have to join. To emphasize his point, he announced that even as a gay man, he thought there should be an exclusive place for the Scouts to meet.

The room was stunned. Supervisor Tom Urbanske remembers thinking, “Did I hear that right?”

He did, and that was just the beginning of what has become as polarizing an issue around here as offshore oil drilling.

Lanzi, an Eagle Scout, was fired several weeks later. Supervisors followed through and rescinded the lease and passed a resolution criticizing the Scouts’ policy.

Though most of the uproar was anti-Scout, some people, particularly in conservative northern Santa Barbara County around Santa Maria and Lompoc, were rankled by the supervisors’ resolution.

“In the north county, people are very supportive of the Boy Scouts,” said Urbanske, one of two supervisors who voted against the measure.

Warnken never got signatures in the north part of the county, where he might have found even greater support for his measure, Stoker said.

Stanley of Pacific Pride is tired of the issue.

“This has been going on a year,” she said. “In reality, does anything change after all is said and done? The answer is no.”