The gays won.

 After a siege of some 20 years duration, the Boy Scouts have blinked.

 In a series of e-mails to news organizations, the Boy Scouts of
America announced yesterday that it will soon consider a policy to abandon its policy.

Forever, the Scouts have banned homosexual adult leaders. The thinking was twofold. First, that homosexual leaders were poor role models for boys in a values-based organization. Second, that homosexual leaders may be more likely to sexually abuse the Scouts.

Both are valid points.

And the Boy Scouts of America stood up for them for a long time. They fought it all the way to the Supreme Court.

As recently as last summer, the organization reiterated its policy. No gays in the adult leadership.

And now it has buckled.

Rather, now it has been pummeled into submission. In the age of tolerance, there has been none for the values of the Boy Scouts. A savage attack by gay activists and their politically correct supporters has seen the Scouts pushed out of schools and city parks, stripped of corporate sponsorships, and attacked on every front.

Hated for its values, those intolerant of the Scouts have used the accusation of anti-gay prejudice as a pretense for their attacks upon it. The Boy Scouts of America is not hated because of its policy on gays, it is hated because of the principles in the Scout Oath and Law.

The one proclaims: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight,” and the other adds, “A Scout is: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent.”

That’s why gay activists and the entirety of the liberal world are ill at ease with the Boy Scouts. It is an organization that teaches a value system liberalism seeks desperately to debase.

Nothing proves more convincingly that the world has turned upside down than the fact that the Boy Scouts of America is under attack by institutions of social and political power in our country. Indeed, good is being called evil and evil is being called good.

But about the gay rule.

It is going away.

The Boy Scouts are telegraphing that soon the national organization will have no policy on homosexuality and the decision about whether or not to allow homosexual leaders will be left to local chartering organizations.

Those are the churches and Rotary clubs across the country that sponsor their local troops.

The move will take the national Scout organization out of the spotlight and the crosshairs. But the attack, invigorated by blood in the water, will simply slide a link down the chain.

That will raise issues for the Mormon church and the United Methodist Church, as well as the Catholic and Presbyterian churches. They, in that order, are the top four sponsors of Boy Scout troops in America. Between them, they’ve got about 1.3 million Scouts in some 62,000 troops.

Mormons have been under steady attack by gay activists since their church supported Proposition 8 in California, seeking to ban gay marriage. Though they worked with Catholics and Evangelicals in the effort, it was the Mormon church and its people who earned the special ire of the gay movement.

Since then, the Mormon church has unofficially been bending over backward to curry favor with the homosexual community. It has gone very gay friendly and, though the church still considers gay sex a sin, the push is on to be extra friendly and embracing of homosexual people.

It seems unlikely that the Boy Scouts of America would have taken this step without consulting with its major chartering organizations – the churches listed.

Quite possibly, the churches have signed off on this proposal, and will each say that they also accept gay people as Scout leaders. But they may make a distinction between gay and practicing gay.

Gay means someone has same-gender attraction. Practicing gay means someone has same-gender sex.

Of the four main religious sponsors of Scouting, only the Presbyterian Church allows its clergy to be practicing gay. Catholics, United Methodists and Mormons don’t consider being homosexual a sin, but they do consider having homosexual sex a sin.

It is possible those churches could hold to the same standard for their Scout leaders. It seems almost certain that that would be the stand of the Mormon church, which treats the Scoutmaster position as a “calling,” or part of its lay clergy.

So, at least on paper, it seems likely that the Boy Scouts of America and the lion’s share of its troops will eliminate the rule banning gay leaders, at least technically.

But if they think that will buy them any peace or good will from the gay activists, they are completely mistaken. The entire gay-rights movement, like so many forms of liberal activism, operates under the “give them and inch and they’ll take a mile” concept.

Giving in doesn’t buy peace, it attracts more attacks. If you capitulate once, you will capitulate again. Sharks don’t bite once and swim off. They finish you off. And their friends come around for a bite. And now that the Boy Scouts and their constituent churches have shown that they can be intimidated, a lot of people are going to be wanting a piece.

Gay activists, for example, might see through the word game at play here, and insist on the next step – gay lifestyle people as Scout leaders. They will also, presumably, want the Boy Scouts to do some sort of programming that promotes gay heritage, or whatever they call it, as some sort of payback for what they will call generations of discrimination.

And activists always want money.

Much activism is nothing more than a shake down. Call it a grant, call it scholarships, call is institutional aid – somebody usually ends up writing a check to somebody.

People don’t protest you when you pay them.

And people don’t respect you when you cave.

The Boy Scouts are trying to appease gay activists and the politicians they control. Perhaps this move spares the Scouts a fight with the Justice Department. But it also potentially alienates the parents who may not want their sons joining an organization with newly fungible values.

Maybe somewhere at headquarters somebody’s polling has shown that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Maybe our society has so changed that large numbers of people, including Scout parents, now believe that gay sex is “morally straight.”

But truth doesn’t change, and right and wrong aren’t negotiable.

Basically, it’s a fight between good and evil.

And yesterday good blinked.