The drive to love, to form a family, to share your life with somebody, and also to physically express your love combine with other factors to create a core and fundamental part of one’s identity. Some call that a sexual orientation. It’s much more than some fleeting thoughts. It’s much more than a physical behavior. Some heterosexual people have always taken their sexual orientation for granted, and it’s such an innate part of themselves that they’ve never thought about it critically. This is a luxury that LGBT people do not have. 

Regardless, the BSA does not define sexual orientation in terms of behavior. If an awkward gay teenager who’s never even held another boy’s hand, yet decides that he wants to honestly discuss his sexuality with others, he would currently be kicked out of the Boy Scouts. I was a boy scout. I learned and grew substantially as a scout. If I had been kicked out of my scout troop, and reminded every sunday during Deacon’s quorum that the rest of the kids were able to participate in a way that I wasn’t, it would have been much more than an inconvenience. That is an institutionalization of the same bullying gay kids are constantly subjected to, and it’s absolutely shameful. 

For the sake of law and policy it only can be behavior.

The few kids struggling with homosexuality who also would like to be a Boy Scout are inconvenienced, for sure, but not handicapped…Boy Scouts aren’t the only way for a young man to grow up with the values promoted by BSA.

Regardless of behavior, the current policy of the boy scouts is that gay-identified teens cannot take part. I find it odd that you’d make a whole post about the subject, saying that it’s about the kids, while not even having an opinion on whether or not gay-identified teens should be allowed to participate. Currently, the case-by-case scenario is not the status quo, so are you advocating that the BSA reform their policy to allow individual troops to make case-by-case decisions on the matter?

Nobody is arguing that a private organization doesn’t have the right to ban gay kids. They could also ban black kids if they wanted, as long as they weren’t receiving public funds.  Those of us on our side of the issue are ASKING the BSA to do the right thing, in the best interest of all kids – the gay kids, and the straight kids who are learning by example how to treat people that are different than them.  

Both the BSA and LDS Church are private organizations and set what policies they want to. If I were the sole decision maker for those two organization, I’m not sure what I’d do…probably take each individual case as they come.