“Am I angry? Yes. I'm angry,” TV icon and former Boy Scout George Takei wrote to his 2.2 million Facebook followers on Wednesday.
The post comes in response to the Boy Scout’s announcement that the group will maintain its ban on gay scouts and LGBT leaders.
“Earlier this week, ousted scout leader Jennifer Tyrrell announced she would be delivering over 300,000 signatures today to the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Dallas,” writes Takei on his blog. “In a cynical move to preempt that story, the Scouts released a statement yesterday reaffirming its ban on gay scouts and LGBT leaders. The statement indicated that their committee met in secret and unanimously voted to uphold the ban. Hogwash.”
Indeed, Jennifer Tyrrell – the Ohio mom removed as leader of her seven year-old son’s Cub Scouts pack because she’s gay – was in Dallas on Wednesday to deliver her Change.org petition and meet with officials at the Boy Scouts’ headquarters.
“This movement doesn’t stop because 11 anonymous men behind closed doors made a decision to keep discrimination in place,” Tyrrell said, alluding to a secret committee which the Boy Scouts claim unanimously decided to keep the ban intact. “This petition may have started out for me and my son, but it’s grown into something much bigger. Something much more important. Today, when you read through the comments on my petition, you can read the stories of literally thousands of scouts, scout leaders and former scouts who are hoping the Boy Scouts of America will take this moment and end this policy of discrimination against gay Americans.”
Others, including Scouts for Equality founder and Eagle Scout Zach Wahls have also expressed skepticism about the Scouts' secret committee.
“One of the core values of scouting is trustworthiness. The three million members of the Boy Scouts deserve to see formal documentation describing who the members of this subcommittee are, how they reached their conclusion, what exactly that conclusion is, when it was reached and to whom these people are responsible,” said Wahls. “Until that happens, color me highly skeptical about anything that this committee has or has not decided.”
In June, Takei joined Tyrrell, as well as GLAAD and local scouts, at the 43rd Annual NYC Pride March, where he donned his Boy Scouts uniform in a show of support for ending the ban on gay troops.
“The fight is not over,” Takei went on to say in his blog. “Indeed, I, along with Jennifer […] and the folks at GLAAD (The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) will not stop fighting until the ban is overturned, if not in court, then in the court of public opinion.”
