Although the Boy Scouts of America recently ended their ban on openly gay leaders, problems facing the LGBT community in the scouts still require work, Joe Getto, a chapter head of Scouts for Equality, said.
The State News sat down with Getto, who is from the Kansas City area, to get his take on the issue and the steps that can be taken to alleviate it.
With the 2015 National Order of the Arrow Conference occupying campus this week, Getto is here to raise awareness for the cause and hopefully provide an avenue for support among scouts who still do not feel welcome in the organization.
“The national body and the individual councils themselves, in terms of hiring, employment and all that, but individual troops, if they feel that homosexuality is against their beliefs or whatnot, they can choose to have adult leaders and volunteers who are homosexual,” he said.
Getto is openly gay and said he felt the need to resign from his position within the Boy Scouts after a number of off-hand moves from other leaders to “protect” him. Others have faced open discrimination, including being forcibly removed.
Getto said a number of local chartering organizations, a troop’s sponsor, include churches — specifically the Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — that have strong moral objections to homosexuality and homosexual behavior. They are allowed to prevent openly gay leaders in that sense, although Getto said the Boy Scouts as a whole are accepting of gay leaders.
He questioned why homosexuality was specifically condemned by religious sponsors, especially when, for example, Catholics would allow members of other religions to be troop leaders when those religions were condemned by Rome.
“This whole thing that people have been bringing up recently of religious liberty — that it’s really just thinly-veiled homophobia,” he said.
He attributes an interest in Boy Scout policies to a resurgence of the ultra-rightist in the culture war, especially with gay marriage, claiming they realized they were losing on the national front and turned their attention to more local organizations.
Getto said the core of the scouts is not religion-based, although belief in God or a higher power is part of it. However, Scout leaders at the conference seemed to disagree.
“Scouting is founded on a sense of belief in God and spirit,” scout historian Terry Grove said at the Centennial Exhibition ribbon cutting on Monday, before leading the group in prayer.
Getto, pointing toward values like being a good citizen and community responsibility, said ideas like that, while always existing in the scouts, are fairly recent in terms of how prevalent it is, calling it “silly.”
The organization saved his life after discovering he was diabetic at a conference.
“If it wasn’t for my brothers recognizing that fact, I could have easily gone into a coma and they were surprised I wasn’t already in a coma,” he said.
The next day he was called for the Vigil Honor, the highest award that can be granted for service to the Order of the Arrow.
At the conference itself, Getto and a few others are trying to help their cause with a social media campaign where scouts tweet @Scouts4Equality or use Facebook to upload a picture of a scouting insignia with Scouts for Equality on it.
Though the ban on gay scout leaders was lifted, registration for the conference filled up in February, effectively keeping those affected from attending the conference this year.
