If you belong to the Boy Scouts of America, you’re not fit to be a judge in California, that state’s Supreme Court has decided. The court announced on Friday that all seven of its justices had voted to accept the recommendation of its ethics advisory committee that places the Boy Scouts among the organizations judges may not join. The ban applies to “any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, religion, national origin, ethnicity or sexual orientation.” The Scouts have dropped the ban on membership for openly “gay” boys under 18 but still prohibit homosexual and lesbian adults from serving as staff or voluntary leaders.
The state’s high court has banned judges from belonging to groups that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation since 1996, but made an exception for nonprofit youth organizations. The Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on the Code of Judicial Ethics in February recommended eliminating the exception to enhance public confidence in the judiciary. The court’s unanimous decision did not mention the Boy Scouts of America, the Los Angeles Times reported, though there was little doubt that it was the intended target. The ethics advisory committee wrote the exception was “anomalous and inconsistent” with development in the law regarding same-sex relationships, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in 2013 to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act and to allow a lower court ruling to stand striking down Proposition 8, the law adopted by California voters in 1988 to limit marriage to a union between one man and one woman.
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