I was a Boy Scout for six years when I was a youth, from age 11 to 17. The time was 1966 to 1972. I stuck around long enough to become a leader of my troop. I’m still proud of my accomplishments as a Scout, and thankful for the opportunities the organization gave me. The Scouts had a lot of support then: no one spoke ill of them. Now the Scouts are beleaguered and ostracized because they have a policy that restricts membership to heterosexuals. This policy has roots in recent history. It is not inherent in the organization itself.

About five years after I left the Scouts, in the late seventies, a growing anxiety about sexual abuse worked its way into the public’s consciousness. The anxiety intensified until the Amirault’s in Massachusetts were tried, convicted, and imprisoned for raping and sodomizing pre-school children in their day-care center. To contest the defendants’ plea of innocence, the prosecution brought testimony taken in private from boys and girls who were three or four years old. Unbelievably, the prosecution won. In this atmosphere, the Boy Scouts by no means escaped the effort to root out sexual predators. Scoutmasters, like day-care providers, were open to charges of perversion. If scoutmasters, gay or straight, ever took advantage of young boys, it had to be stopped.

Once the Scouts came under suspicion and scrutiny, the media were able to document some actual cases of abuse. The organization responded with two policies: (a) no adult leader would ever be alone with a Scout, and (b) no gay members, adult or otherwise, would be permitted. These rules restored the sense of safety parents craved, and the Scouts kept them in force after the hysteria over abuse had run its course in the late eighties.

Now the Scouts are under attack again. Its good faith response to the earlier attacks—the prohibition against gay membership—opens the organization to charges of unjustified prejudice. Isn’t it ironic, people think: Scouting stands for good citizenship in the community, but the organization excludes some individuals because they are gay. Few people objected to the policy of discrimination when the Scouts first put it in place to protect members from abuse. A decade or more later, in the current climate of support for gay rights, the restrictive membership policy makes the Scouts subject to a new set of serious charges.

Like any organization that gets whipsawed over time, the Scouts have not responded to the second set of attacks as quickly as they did to the first. When they did respond, they defended their policy in the courts. Not long ago, the Supreme Court upheld the organization’s right to ban gays from membership. As a result, the Scouts have lost much of their funding from corporations and from foundations like United Way. Many communities want to ban Scouts from public campgrounds, and from meeting in public schools, churches, or other tax-exempt buildings. In short, the Scouts are losing community support, and their reputation has suffered a great deal, perhaps even more than during the first round of attacks during the early eighties.

The Scouts say in their court briefs that gay membership runs contrary to their message: they teach young men to be morally straight, and being gay doesn’t fit that description. If the Scouts offered a defense based more on history and less on legal argumentation, they could make their case more effectively. After all, members’ sexuality was never an issue until their detractors made it an issue in the late seventies and early eighties. The Scouts never had a membership policy that excluded gays until the critics’ attacks made such a restriction necessary.

Nevertheless, critics tainted the Scouts and said gay men used the organization to gain access to young boys. As one might expect, people found a few gay scoutmasters who actually did abuse their positions of leadership by molesting young men in their troops. The Scouts said never again. We’re going to protect our young people and we’re going to protect our reputation: no gay Scouts and no gay leaders. Ten years later, the boom comes down again, this time in a climate that is much more favorable toward gay rights. People have forgotten the previous attacks, and no one remembers why the Scouts adopted a strict policy against gay membership in the first place.

The Scouts might have won their case before the law, but legal arguments won’t win back the organization’s good standing with the public. To do that, it must appeal to people’s good judgment and sense of fairness. People know it’s not right to condemn an institution for some shortcoming, then slam it again for the good faith efforts it makes to remedy the fault. The Scouts don’t want to discriminate against people who are gay. Their desire now as during the rest of their history is to be inclusive. Without the earlier instances of abuse by gay Scout leaders—and the vilification that these few cases brought—the Scouts would have no policy against gay membership today. The organization would be neutral and silent on the subject, just as most organizations today are. Because of the earlier row, they find themselves in a bad position now. They’ve lost public support due to an unpopular position, but they have no good way to renounce their policy without stirring all the fears that first led to the exclusionary policy.

Lord Baden-Powell, the British military commander, spy, and adventurer who started the Scouting movement nearly a hundred years ago, was probably not a straight heterosexual. Baden-Powell’s biographer, Tim Jeal, refers to his “aesthetic and sexual interest in men.” The possibility that Baden-Powell was gay has never prevented the Scouts from taking great pride in his leadership. The movement preserves his legacy and rightly admires him. In fact, Baden-Powell’s sexuality has nothing to do with his contributions to Scouting. Nor does the sexuality of any Scout leader have anything to do with the contribution Scouting makes to the character and growth of young men. On the other side, Scouting’s effort fifteen years ago to counter insinuations of sexual misconduct should not result in its ostracism today.

The Scouts won’t resolve their dilemma if they fold under pressure and reverse their policy against gay membership. To resolve the problem gracefully, critics should acknowledge the effects of the earlier hysteria. These attacks were overblown and a mistake, and someone outside of Scouting should say so. Then Scouting and its critics can start a conversation about how the organization ought to protect its membership from sexual abuse, and about the standards it uses to select its leaders. It is certainly discriminatory to exclude gays as a group to eliminate the risk of abuse. Virtually all gay Scout leaders would act with integrity and honor. A small number of heterosexual leaders might act dishonorably, and no one recommends that all heterosexuals be barred from membership as a consequence. The fairest policy would be to bar people from membership only after they had committed intolerable acts, not presume that they were likely to commit those acts on the basis of their sexuality. That is the regime that should be in place now. The Scouts won’t be able to return to that sensible policy, though, unless its critics back off, and allow it to work out its policies in peace. It’s a good organization, and people should allow it to be good.

Steven Greffenius lives in Westwood, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. His book, The Last Jeffersonian: Ronald Reagan’s Dreams of America was published by June, July, and August Books in 2002.