Dale, now 29, was dismissed as assistant scoutmaster for Monmouth Council's Troop 73 in Matawan, N.J., in July 1990, after an article in the Newark Star-Ledger identified him as the co-president of a gay student alliance at Rutgers University. Two years later, Dale launched a court battle that wound its way through New Jersey state courts all the way up to the Supreme Court.

The handsome Dale, whose cornfed, all-American good looks made him a favored talking head, became the face of a fight against anti-gay discrimination that took on one of the most symbolically important organizations (after the U.S. military) that still excludes gays from membership.

The court effectively reversed a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that the Boy Scouts are a "public accommodation," since they use schools and other public property as meeting places and, in doing so, violated the state's anti-discrimination laws. The 90-year-old Boy Scouts of America has long prohibited gays from membership or leadership roles.

"The Boy Scouts asserts that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the values it seeks to instill," opined Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing the majority decision. The ruling held that application of New Jersey's public accommodations law represented an unconstitutional burden on the right to free association by intruding "into a group's internal affairs by forcing it to accept a member it does not desire."

The debate originates in the Scout Oath and Law, which states that scouts and scout leaders should be "morally straight" and "clean." The Boy Scouts have long held that homosexuals by definition cannot be morally straight or clean.

"The Boy Scouts asserts that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the values embodied in the Scout Oath and Law ... and that the organization does not want to promote homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior," Rehnquist wrote. "The Court gives deference to the Boy Scouts' assertions regarding the nature of its expression."

The court's free speech argument was unsettling for gay activists, who often use the First Amendment as a foundation in pushing for their own gains. The court dismissed arguments made by Evan Wolfson of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Dale's lawyer, that the Boy Scout ban was akin to excluding women from private organizations. The court's 1997 decision forcing the Rotary Club to admit women, Rehnquist said, did not "materially interfere with the ideas that the organization sought to express."

Wednesday's decision had civil rights activists and constitutional scholars arguing over how broadly the ruling could be interpreted. Would it open the door for private organizations to discriminate against women or ethnic minorities? Would other private organizations scramble to write anti-gay messages into their charters? Or would the ruling serve only to exclude gay teens and leaders from joining in the campfire songs and adventure of the Boy Scouts?

Salon News canvassed experts from all sides of the debate in the wake of the ruling. Their reactions follow.

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