One can ask, since it does not appear that Lord Baden-Powell did not seem to hate either atheists or homosexuals, how is it that the modern American movemnet excludes them so vigorously?

Lets discuss the technical angle at which the Scouts themselves officially cut it.

Their judgement against atheists and other non-One True God sorts is that such people do not live up to the Scout Oath which requires a Scout to "do [his] duty to God" and the Scout Law which states "A Scout Is Reverent".

Interestingly, this latter point of the Scout Law was not encoded in Baden-Powell's original vision of the Scout Law.

We must ask ourselves then what sort of organization would feel the themselves qualified to adjudicate what another's duty to his creator would be or, for that matter, what form one's creator should take.

The answer is "mostly Christian." [1]

This also goes a long way towards explaining the Boy Scouts of America's policy towards homosexuals.

Currenty, membership requirements are set at the national level. [2] The BSA's rationale is described in the bsalegal.org FAQ:

Boy Scouts believes it is important to have national uniformity of values. Troops from all over get together at camporees on a district and council level, and once every four years at the national Jamboree. Few youth organizations can claim that sort of national identity.

This means that you aren't free to just form up a "gay troop" and be done with the situation.

It is commonly claimed [3] that both the scope and reach of American Scouting's exclusionist stance is based in the fact that the majority of chartering organizations are church groups. This relationship serves both Scouts and Churches well, providing the Scouts a steady flow of youth at the same time providing the church with an instant youth program.

This has created a vortex from which there appears to be little escape.

Organizations that would likely prefer or would be required to admit youth into the program without regard to religeous orientation or sexual persuasion are expelled out of the organization by its current organizational requirements. When the current membership is polled it tends to support those practices that made it strong in the first place -- if your church signed on because you knew there would be no chance that your youth would encounter those it found intolerable, there's no way you'd support a program that then reversed this.

This some say is the Sword of Damacles that hangs over the program. Current chartering organizations [4] favor exclusion of homosexuals to the extent that they are willing to take enormous financial hits [5] in order to do so.

As more external sources withdraw funding and charter support it becomes easy to see the Boy Scouts of America becoming an isolated entity. The signs of strain are already there, the organization's stance on athiesm and homosexual membership becoming more extreme and pronounced as time goes on especially as gay rights and acceptance in the wider society broaden.

How -- or if -- this spiral will ever correct itself is a mystery. Its entirely possible that an offshoot will take prominence or the organization will realize it can no longer weather closing doors not only to those they currently find distasteful but those sympathetic to the excluded parties.

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