A pro-family activist predicts that homosexuals will flock to Boy Scout troops, putting boys at risk, now that the organization is closer to dropping its ban.
"These people will be drawn like flies - I hate to say it that way - but that's what's going to happen to this opportunity," predicts Linda Harvey, president of Mission America.
The executive committee of the Boy Scouts of America unanimously approved a resolution July 10 that would end the ban on homosexual adult leaders, allowing individual scout units to set their own policy, The Associated Press reported.
The Boy Scouts dropped its ban on allowing openly homosexual scouts in 2013, though it kept the ban on homosexual leaders at the time.
OneNewsNow has reported on the Boy Scouts since then, including the creation of a faith-based scouting organization called Trail Life USA, and the loss of membership in BSA.
The Los Angeles Times has reported on the Scouts' so-called "Peversion Files," which documented suspected sexual abusers - 3,100 cases - in the BSA dating back to the 1940s.
After interviewing scouts who alleged abuse, the newspaper reported that BSA responded to allegations with "denial, blame, and legal hardball."
The newest announcement wasn't a surprise, since BSA's president Robert Gates declared in May that the longstanding ban was no longer "sustainable."
In a statement Monday, the BSA said the resolution was approved by the executive committee on Friday, and would become official policy if ratified by the organization's larger National Executive Board at a meeting on July 27.
Harvey says BSA's decision "flies in the face of everything they have ever said that stood for as far as Christian moral values. It flies in the face of being morally straight, and I guess that's totally out the window now, too."
The Boy Scouts of America won a Supreme Court decision in 2000 that allowed the organization to ban homosexuals from its troops. But that legal victory was followed by pressure on the organization to drop its ban.