I haven't yet commented on the ACLU's successful (pending appeal) suit to prevent the annual Boy Scout Jamboree from taking place at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. The ACLU claims that the Defense Department's support violates the 1st Amendment because the Boy Scouts of America "excludes atheists and agnostics" and calls for members to believe in God. But both leftwing and rightwing web sites invariably bring up the Boy Scouts' ban against gay scouts and scoutmasters as an underlying motive behind the ACLU's action.
I think a reasonable case can be made that the federal government shouldn't provide such support to the Boy Scouts, and I also believe funding for PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts goes beyond the federal government's role as defined by the Constitution.
But like fighting to ban military recruiters from college campuses (in a case now headed for the U.S. Supreme Court), the suit against the Boy Scouts' holding their Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill is horrendously bad politics. In fact, if we hired an expensive public relations firm and asked how we could ensure that independents and moderate conservatives, especially in the red states, would continue to see "gay rights" as an example of cultural extremism tied to the noxious left and its anti-Americanism, they'd probably say "target military recruitment and the Boy Scout Jamboree."
Update: The New York Times
misreports, "a Senate vote this week on a measure allowing
military installations to continue acting as hosts to the Boy
Scouts, whose policy barring gay leaders has prompted lawsuits to
deny the Scouts access to government property."