The move to punish the Boy Scouts for not allowing gay adult leaders has moved from private, politically correct businesses to United Ways and now to at least one human rights commission, which, ironically, is specifically charged to oppose all unfair bias and illegal discrimination.

Monday, October 09, 2000

The move to punish the Boy Scouts for not allowing gay adult leaders has moved from private, politically correct businesses to United Ways and now to at least one human rights commission, which, ironically, is specifically charged to oppose all unfair bias and illegal discrimination. The Red Wing Human Rights Commission has sent me preliminary material that initiates a campaign to deny United Way funds to Boy Scouts, and they are even seeking their City Council’s support in the effort.

Human rights commissions are charged to support the state law that not only disallows public accommodations discrimination against gays and lesbians but also stipulates that churches and youth organizations may do so and, yet more basic, they are obliged to bow to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of the very position one opposes and the basic human rights provided in the U.S. Constitution.

The Red Wing commission has become active and energetic within the past few years, and I was among those directors of the Minnesota League of Human Rights Commissions – and chair of the neighboring Austin commission for nearly a decade – who encouraged the previously quiescent group. It is because Red Wing commissioners recognized my passionate commitment to human rights (including gays and lesbians) that they send me such as their Sept. 13 announcement. Red Wing is one of the more alert and aggressive commissions in the state, and I praise them for that. In this, however, they have gone astray.

They assert that the Minnesota Human Rights Act makes illegal discrimination "in housing, the schools, the workplace, public services and public accommodations, which are based on race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual preference, marital status, disability, public assistance, age, or family status." (Both the language and emphasis here, of course, are theirs and not the law’s.) This is correct, but it is also correct that a strong and clear provision is made in the act to exempt churches and youth organizations from this provision. State law, that is to say, specifically says that Boy Scouts may discriminate on the basis of sexual preference and that it is legal to do so. It is a very great disappointment to me that the Red Wing commission carefully hides that crucial distinction. It just is not honest.

They strain honesty and violate fairness when they attempt to qualify the status the Supreme Court made in finding the BSA to be private by saying it is only "technically and legally private." The ruling makes it fully and actually private without qualification. The court has the final word on what is legal and constitutional, and who are these to modify or except from it? The court has spoken, and we must listen.

The Constitution grants many rights that the Red Wing rights commission attacks, such as freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of association. It seeks to deny these rights to Boy Scouts, either by drying up the funds necessary to exist or by intimidating it into changing its character to conform to nothing more objective or substantive than political correctness.

Moreover, it is not necessary to target United Way for people to choose individually not to support Boy Scouts. These organizations already allow donors to designate and, thereby, decline to support any program on the list. If a person does not wish to support Boy Scouts or an abortion clinic, United Way allows the decision.

The commission reports that United Way director Mary Plein told it that the BSA policy has placed it "in a very difficult situation, as they have a nondiscrimination statement in their allocation policy." If its quotation is more accurate than its citation of MHRA, Plein either misspoke or succumbed to intimidation. The fact is that its valid policy does allow it to contribute to Scouts, because no less than the Supreme Court has ruled that Scouts’ position does not constitute illegal discrimination. The people who place United Ways in a most difficult position are those who seek to hold them hostage to their own political agenda.

The Rochester commission has made a similar error. I heard some of its members insist that the city had to enact a specific gay rights ordinance in order for it to enforce MHRA. Nonsense. The Minnesota Department of Human Rights enforces the law, and the only direct action a local commission is allowed to take is the confidential no-fault grievance procedure. To undertake law enforcement, Rochester would need to create a separate human rights department and hire a professional staff.

When local human rights groups defy the Supreme Court and seek to deny human rights so basic they are provided for by the Constitution and need not be addressed by state law, they arrogate to themselves the right to determine which human rights are allowed. When they exceed state law and themselves advocate selective discrimination, it is difficult not to suspect they have a hidden agenda that is other than human rights.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays