GOP’s Open Season on Gay Kids

Samantha Allen

Now that same-sex marriage is a right nationwide, Republicans have turned their gaze to LGBT youth.

As the one-month anniversary of nationwide same-sex marriage approaches, some top GOP leaders have already moved on from LGBT adults to LGBT kids. And why wouldn’t they? LGBT youth can’t vote, generally don’t get married, and have even fewer avenues for legal recourse than their adult counterparts.

If there was any doubt that youth are up next in the seemingly never-ending LGBT culture war, last week proved it. While the abortion debate took up most of the political bandwidth, some in the Republican Party were busy ensuring that LGBT youth would become a 2016 talking point.

Last Monday, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) set in motion a resolution that would allow individual scout units to decide whether or not to allow gay leadership, effectively ending the organization’s unilateral ban on gay scoutmasters. This move has already drawn the ire of two 2016 GOP hopefuls: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and former Texas governor Rick Perry.

On Tuesday, Walker said that the previous policy “protected children and advanced Scout values” and, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Perry stood by his previous statement that “openly active gays” would be a “problem” for the BSA because they would “distract from the mission of scouting” with “sex education.” Walker has since clarified that he believes the policy “should be left up to the leaders of the Scouts” but Perry added on Sunday that “scouting would be better off if they didn’t have openly gay Scoutmasters.”

Present in both Walker and Perry’s comments is the implicit assumption that all Boy Scouts are straight, despite the fact that gay youth have been able to participate in the BSA since January of last year.

A BSA leadership manual (PDF) says that the Scoutmaster should serve as “a mentor and role model to the Scouts.” The ban that Walker opposed—and that Perry still opposes—precludes even the possibility that a gay scout could look up to a gay Scoutmaster as a role model.

The day after Walker implied that scouts needed “protection” from homosexuality, the Senate voted down the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA), an amendment to the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA) that would have prohibited discrimination and bullying on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools. The Republicans had already blocked similar legislation in the House in February.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/21/gop-s-open-season-on-gay-kids.html