A group seeking to promote acceptance of the LGBT community in Swarthmore is urging its school district to limit its involvement with a group that does not accept gay members.
The Swarthmore LGBT/Straight Network has urged the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District to disallow the local Boy Scouts of America chapter from using its premises or take a public stance against the organization’s policy of barring openly gay members.
Deb Dunbar, a member of the LGBT group, said the issue arose earlier this school year when the son of a lesbian couple in the area brought home a flier distributed to students at Swarthmore Rutledge School advertising an upcoming Boy Scouts recruiting meeting there.
The district’s 2001 nondiscrimination policy is LGBT-inclusive and mandates “course offerings, counseling, assistance, employment, athletics and extracurricular activities” without discrimination.
The Borough of Swarthmore in 2006 amended its nondiscrimination policy to add sexual orientation and gender identity as classes protected from discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations and commercial property.
Dunbar said those policies are incompatible with the Boy Scouts regulations, which categorize homosexuality as “inconsistent with the obligations … to be morally straight and clean in thought, word and deed,” according to a 2004 position statement.
“The Boy Scouts bring up all kinds of emotions for people,” Dunbar said. “They’re an incredibly beloved institution, which makes it all the more sad that they maintain this discriminatory policy, but we’re not about trying to tell people not to participate in Boy Scouts if that’s what they want to do and if the families are comfortable with that. But we think it’s wrong that the district has this antidiscrimination policy, the borough has this antidiscrimination ordinance and yet this group that so clearly discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation is allowed to meet on this property. I think it sends a mixed message to our community.”
The group sent a letter to the district last month requesting that it deny future requests from the local Boy Scouts chapter to use its premises.
District superintendent Dr. Richard Noonan told the organization, and reiterated to PGN last week, that after consultation with the district’s solicitor, the district’s facilities operate as a limited public forum and the district cannot legally or constitutionally exclude a group from using its facilities based on the viewpoints of that group.
Several members of the LGBT/Straight Network spoke about the issue at a recent school board meeting, and Dunbar said the viewpoint-neutral issue was again raised.
Noonan declined to comment further on the issue but elaborated on the district’s position in a letter sent to local media on the issue last month.
“The district cannot pick and choose among the community groups which seek to use its facilities based on their beliefs, and no endorsement by the district of any particular group’s beliefs is implied by permitting community groups to lease the facilities,” Noonan wrote. “By providing the ‘content-neutral’ public forum, the district is able to accommodate a broad array of community interests, including children’s after-school activities and sports, adult-education classes, musical performances, advocacy groups and local and national political candidate forums.”
The Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act, included in the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, prevents any school that receives funding from the federal Department of Education from denying “equal access or a fair opportunity to meet to, or discriminate against, any group officially affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America … that wishes to conduct a meeting within that designated open forum or limited public forum, including denying such access or opportunity or discriminating for reasons based on the membership or leadership criteria or oath of allegiance to God and country.”
Dunbar said her group has asked the district to issue a public statement delineating that it does not support the Scouts’ policy of banning gay members but has not received a response.
“I think the school district is endorsing this activity on some level,” she said. “If the Boy Scouts were to say that no Jews belong or no blacks belong, my guess is that the district would find a way to not accommodate them. So we want to increase community awareness about the policies of the Boy Scouts and increase awareness that this is a hypocritical practice for Swarthmore to be supporting them in this way.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].