The ACLU’s 30 Years War: [Note: this regards the Boy Scout jamboree] “The Jamboree took place at Fort A.P. Hill in Caroline County, Virginia–its permanent home since 1981. Yet most coverage of the president’s speech failed to note that the 2005 Jamboree may be the Scouts’ last at the site. On June 22, Illinois federal district court Judge Blanche Manning prohibited the Defense Department from allowing the Scouts to use the site for future Jamborees.

WHY? Well, for the past 25 years the American Civil Liberties Union has conducted a legal war on the Boy Scouts. In 1980, the ACLU filed its first lawsuit seeking to remold the Scouts into an organization more to its liking. Claiming that the Scouts constituted a ‘public accommodation’ for the purpose of state and local civil rights laws, the ACLU brought a discrimination suit against the Scouts on behalf of a troop leader excluded from membership after he took a male date to his senior prom. According to the ACLU throughout years of litigation, the Scouts didn’t believe in anything in particular, so that its associational rights were not infringed by subjugation to the imperatives of state and local discrimination law.”