A year after the Boy Scouts of America’s National Council voted to allow openly gay youth to join the organization, LGBT advocates are calling for gay leaders to be included.
While advocates have urged companies to stop donating to the Irving-based BSA until its discrimination ceased, of which many did including Intel and UPS, Scouts are back at it.
Pascal Tessier, the first openly gay Eagle Scout, launched a petition earlier this year to encourage AmazonSmile to stop funding the Scouts. AmazonSmile allows shoppers to select an organization to which the company will donate a small portion of their purchase. The company’s own policy prevents discrimination based on sexual orientation. More than 120,000 people have signed it, and Tessier and other Scouts will deliver the petition to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters Wednesday.
However, GLAAD’s conversations with Amazon revealed that Amazon doesn’t plan to stop giving money to the BSA. In fact, the company doesn’t plan to pull form any group not designated a s hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“There’s not a lot of question that the Boy Scouts’ position on gay leadership definitely qualifies as intolerant by anybody’s standards – especially ours,” said SPLC co-founder and general counsel Joe Levin to MSNBC. “If [Amazon is] relying at all upon the principles of the Southern Poverty Law Center, they couldn’t include the Boy Scouts on their list of potential recipients.”
Despite the big push for gay Scout inclusion last year, LGBT advocates expect it’ll be a few more years before the organization welcomes openly gay leaders.
