Evangelical Weakness in Gay Boy Scouts Debate Could Hurt GOP

Photo Credit: tedeytanSigns of waning evangelical power in the nation’s culture wars and in Republican policy — and some unexpected challenges for GOP candidates — loom as the 103-year-old Boy Scouts of America gears up for a definitive vote this week on whether to welcome openly gay youths into the organization’s ranks.

If the BSA delegates gathering just outside Dallas vote to admit gays, it will reinforce the growing notion that evangelical Protestants and their conservative Catholic allies no longer can muster their troops as they once did, in such battles as state referendums over same-sex marriage and the 1996 enactment of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

“There’s no lobby more vicious than the homosexual lobby, and the 65 to 80 million-member evangelical constituency provides no troops for the fight against that lobby,” said David Lane, president of Pastors & Pews and a leading religious right political organizer. “Evangelicals are playing checkers in a chess game.”

A prominent Mormon and board member of a national conservative political organization said privately said that his church, bruised from public relations battles with gay-rights activist groups, has been left holding the financial bag after other denominations failed to come through with promised aid in the fight for Proposition 8, California’s voter initiative against same-sex marriage. The Mormon church has moved on to other battles in the cultural wars rather than take on the gay-rights activists.

After floating a plan to end the 3.9 million-member group’s ban on gays, BSA leaders have crafted a compromise that would allow openly gay Scouts to participate but maintain the ban on adult gay Scout leaders. Even that move sparked adamant opposition from some Christian leaders, especially those who ally with the Republican Party.

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