This may be the last free Thanksgiving dinner for the Boy Scouts of Philadelphia. Citing a local 1982 “fair practices” law, the city solicitor has given the Scouts until Dec. 3 to renounce its policy of excluding homosexuals or forfeit the grand Beaux-Arts building it has rented from the city for $1 a year since 1928.
“While we respect the right of the Boy Scouts to prohibit participation in its activities by homosexuals,” the solicitor, Romulo Diaz, said last week in an interview, “we will not subsidize that discrimination by passing on the costs to the people of Philadelphia.”
The city has tentatively placed the market value at $200,000 a year and invited the Boy Scouts to remain in the nearly 100-year-old building as paying tenants.
The Supreme Court ruled seven years ago that the national Boy Scouts, as a private organization, had the right to exclude homosexuals from its ranks. The Boy Scouts also prohibit atheists and agnostics from employment on the grounds that such beliefs are inconsistent with the values of the country’s largest youth organization. Two years ago, Congress passed the Support Our Scouts Act to protect chapters from local government attempts to strip them of access to public facilities in response to the anti-homosexual policy.
Jeff Jubelirer, a spokesman for Cradle of Liberty, said the chapter, hoping to save its historic headquarters, had sought to renounce an affiliation with the national policy when the dispute with the city arose in 2003.
“We were trying to be amenable to all sides, but National would not allow us to keep that language, so we rescinded it. We can’t have a policy where we put in specific words that National won’t allow or we’ll lose our charter. We can’t afford not to be part of the national Boy Scouts,” he said.
Jubelirer said Cradle of Liberty has not received any complaints from an individual claiming discrimination. While the national application for scout leaders clearly states employment is not open to homosexuals, Jubelirer suggested the local chapter has been operating under a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for other employees.
Cradle of Liberty says it serves more than 64,000 youths, mostly from the inner city, and that, as a result, its programming is centered more on mentoring and after-school programs instead of suburban camping trips, but it also hosts the oldest scouting event in the country, a three-day annual encampment at Valley Forge. Each year, thousands of troops gather to commemorate the harsh winter that George Washington spent there with Continental army soldiers.
“If I do not receive an executed lease, signed by the Boy Scouts, to remain as tenants paying a fair market rent, we will begin looking for alternative tenants that can take over the property June 1, 2008,” Diaz said.
