One Utah

If you are using public facilities, you cannot deny membership to any member of the public.  Allow me to expand - if you are using a tax supported building to hold your meetings and you are paying a symbolic annual rent of $1, which means the taxpayers are effectively footing the entire bill for your organization to use their facility, then you had damn well better have a good reason for denying membership in your organization to law-abiding persons. 

If your organization is paying fair market value for its use of the government meeting space, then you can decide who gets to be a member.

Case in point, the Boy Scouts had a $1 per year lease on a building in Philadelphia.  The city government there agrees the Boy Scouts have the right to deny membership to gay scouts and to refuse to allow gay men to be scout leaders but if you’re principle is based on anti-gay prejudice, you shouldn’t receive a taxpayer funded subsidy - hence the boy scouts have been told “Pay fair market rent or move out.”

The Scouts, of course, are whining and crying and carrying on.  I think it’s interesting that they seem to want to have it both ways - they think taxpayer money should subsidize their organization but want to discriminate against some of those taxpayers without penalty.  Although some conservatives are attempting to argue the scouts are being discriminated against on the basis of their “viewpoints” it seems to me the scouts are the ones being discriminatory.

This entry was posted Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Bigotry, Homophobia, Queer, Society, Tax Policy, The Constitution, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.