Supreme Court won't hear Boy Scouts appeal

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from the Boy Scouts of America over what the organization claims is discrimination because of its policy against hiring gays. The case revisited the gay rights fight surrounding the high court's ruling four years ago that the Boy Scouts have the right to bar openly gay scout leaders. This time, the question was whether states may treat the Scouts differently than other organizations because of that policy. The Scouts asked the justices to hear a case from Connecticut, where officials dropped the group from a list of charities that receive donations through a state employee payroll deduction plan. That's unconstitutional discrimination, the Boy Scouts argued. "To exclude the Boy Scouts from a forum based on the values they hold and the conduct they require of their members is to exclude Boy Scouts based on viewpoint and identity," lawyers for the Scouts argued in their Supreme Court appeal. The Scouts took in about $10,000 annually from the employee charity campaign, the filing said. The BSA is pursuing a similar court fight in San Diego, where city officials want to evict the group from a park where the organization runs a youth aquatic center. The Bush administration sided with the Scouts in that case last week. Connecticut officials also raised the issue of discrimination to explain why the BSA was dropped from the State Employee Campaign Committee in 2000. A state human rights commission had found that including the Boy Scouts in the employee donation program would violate Connecticut's gay rights law, state attorney general Richard Blumenthal argued to the high court. The gay rights law prohibits the state from "becoming a party to any agreement, arrangement, or plan which has the effect of sanctioning discrimination," the state's legal filing said. A federal appeals court ruled last year that Connecticut did not violate the Scouts' First Amendment rights. The Connecticut policy was intended more to protect gays than to silence the views of groups like the Scouts, the court said in upholding the ruling of a lower federal judge.