Eagle Scout, Pascal Tessier
The New York Boy Scouts affiliate announced yesterday that they had hired 18-year-old Eagle Scout Pascal Tessier to work for them at summer scout camp this year. Pascal Tessier is an openly gay Eagle Scout and this hiring flies in the face of the
Boy Scouts' national homophobic policy.
“We’ve had an antidiscrimination policy for a very, very long time,” said Richard G. Mason, a board member of the Greater New York Councils, the local umbrella group for Boy Scouts in the city’s five boroughs. “This young man applied for a job. We judged his application on the merits. He’s highly qualified. We said yes to him irrespective of his sexual orientation.”
He said Mr. Tessier’s name was forwarded for review by the national organization in Irving, Tex., last month, as were the names of everyone hired to work at scout camps in the summer.
History has once again made the Boy Scouts' national
policy a public embarrassment.
Boy Scouts national spokesman Deron Smith said there was no change in that policy, which has been highly divisive. As for any further response to the New York announcement, Smith said, “We are looking into the matter.”
Look no further than the boys you train to become young men, who embody all of the characteristics of leadership and community you proclaim is your mission, only to turn your back on them once they achieve the confidence to be
who you've taught them to be. Pascal Tessier became one of the first openly gay
Eagle Scouts last year, in no small part to the work and suffering of other young men who were not afforded the Eagle Scout ranking.
“I don’t know of any other Scouts out there who have said, ‘I am gay and I defy BSA to kick me out’ — and Pascal has done that,” said Eric Andresen, whose gay son, Ryan, was denied Eagle Scout status in 2012 even though he had completed all the requirements.
Andresen, who is on the executive board of a group called Scouts for Equality, said his son, now 19, was treated so badly that he no longer talks about it.
“The fact that Pascal is now able to get his award is directly because of what Ryan unfortunately went though,” Andresen said.
Litigation may be the Boy Scouts' future, but change one way or another is inevitable. Parents and adults always lament the mistakes of their own youth. All of us want our children or the children under our charge to avoid the same mistakes we have made. The problem is that, in the end, everyone makes
their own mistakes; but if we are lucky, the young people we pass the torch to will fix some of the ones we have made.