Scouts sue to stay in headquarters

Chad Groening - OneNewsNow - 5/29/2008 11:00:00 AM

A Boy Scouts chapter is suing the city of Philadelphia for charging the organization $200,000 rent because the city doesn't like the Scouts' ban on homosexuals from participating in Scouting.

For 80 years, the Cradle of Liberty Council of the Boy Scouts of America has paid $1 a year to rent their headquarters building in the "City of Brotherly Love." But now the city says the Scouts must open their membership to homosexuals, or begin paying $200,000 a year, which the city calls "fair market rent," to remain in the facility -- a facility the Scouts built, maintained, and improved over eight decades at no cost to the city.
 
The federal lawsuit, filed on May 23, accuses the city of censorship for targeting the Scouts, but maintaining free or nominal fees with other groups that limit membership.

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Bob Bork, Jr., a spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America, says the Council was really put between a rock and a hard place -- either pay what he calls a "punitive rental rate," or be evicted.
 
"The rate of $200,000 a year would be probably the highest rate paid for any office space in the city of Philadelphia; probably as high as the high end in Manhattan," he relates. "And you know, the Boy Scouts are the Boy Scouts; they're not Donald Trump. They can't afford this sort of thing."
 
Bork says in 2000 the Supreme Court ruled that as a private organization, the Boy Scouts have a First Amendment right to determine their own membership policy. "Clearly the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the State of Pennsylvania, and the applicable statutes are on our side," he points out -- then adds: "If you can be confident in those circumstances, then I guess we're confident."

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