Boy Scouts Case Summary

In 1978 James Dale, at the age of eight, became a member of the Boys Scouts and since then he became an active member of the organization. He achieved the rank of Eagle Scout and in 1989 he decided to apply for the adult membership for the Boys Scouts. Everything went well and he was granted with the adult membership. Later on he attended college and became open about his sexuality declaring himself homosexual and in addition to this he became copresident of the Lesbian/Homosexual Alliance of his university. As an active activist of the Lesbian/Homosexual Alliance he went on different events and even made it to the newspaper. After this happened Dale received a letter from the Boys Scouts in which they told him his adult membership was revoked …show more content…
He alleged that the Boy Scouts were violating a state law that prevented public organizations to discriminate people based on their sexual orientation. Here we can see that the Civil Rights Act (1866 & 1871) is being violated. Both of these acts say that all persons have the same property rights and if those rights are failed to be enforced that can be a reason for them to sue in court. This court case ended up having the court judge in favor of the Boys Scouts and both the Superior Court of New Jersey and the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled in favor of Dale in 1995. Later in 2000 the Boys Scouts sued Dale and took the case back to court. The Boys Scouts were suing back because they felt that the First Amendment was being violated. They said that their freedom of speech and association was being violated by making them accept Dale back even though they say they have it clear that they do not accept homosexuals in their organization. In this case the Boys Scouts …show more content…
This is hard case to deal with because there are not many laws that will protect the LGBT group. There are tricky ways in which the law can be walked around it. In this case of homosexual discrimination the law looked on the discrimination part, but they took a turn where they made it seem as if the Boys Scout organization was having their right of free expression and association violated and this made them get out of the trouble they were in before. After doing this research I have learned more about the LGBT society and the amount of discrimination they are going through. More than that I am surprised how can the law be manipulated to make it seem as if the LGBT society is not being discriminated but organizations have the right to decide who do they let in or not without considering the person. This is extremely hard to analyze but I am glad that I took a chance to go in depth and draw my own conclusions and learn how laws are put in