Negotiations between Philadelphia Boy Scouts and the city government have ended; the Scouts are being evicted.
For three years the Philadelphia council of the Boy Scouts of America held its ground. It resisted the city’s request to change its discriminatory policy toward gay people despite threats that if it did not do so, the city would evict the group from a municipal building where the Scouts have resided practically rent free since 1928.
Hailed as the birthplace of the Boy Scouts, the Beaux Arts building is the seat of the seventh-largest chapter of the organization and the first of the more than 300 council service centers built by the Scouts around the country over the past century.
Municipal officials drew the line at the Beaux Arts building because the city owns the half-acre of land where the building stands. The Boy Scouts erected the ornate building and since 1928 have leased the land from the city for a token sum of $1 a year. City officials said the market value for renting the building was about $200,000 a year, and they invited the Boy Scouts to remain as full-paying tenants.
Jeff Jubelirer, a spokesman for the local chapter, said it could not afford $200,000 a year in rent, and that such a price would require it to cut summer-camp funds for 800 needy children. […]
So they’re saying that if a group does some sort of good, they should be exempt from anti-discrimination law? “Well, it’s true we fired all the Jews, but we also built a home for stray cats, so we should be exempt from the law!”
I’m sorry for the decent scouts and boys this hurts, but the city did the right thing, and dealt the Scouts an important symbolic loss. It’s right that the Scouts suffer some consequences for their decision to support bigotry. The Scouts will be much better off in a few decades, when enough of the yahoos currently running the organization have died that their homophobic policies can be removed.
I’m not sure if discrimination against atheists was also at issue in this conflict.
(I previously posted about this conflict in August of 2006.)
Ironic, isn’t it, that Lord Baden-Powell may well have been a repressed homosexual himself.
From the link:
Interesting. I have to wonder what is festering in the soul of the BSA to create such an embrace of bigotry.
—Myca
One word: “puritanism.”
Another word: law. In the UK it would presently be illegal for them to have a no gays rule. That said, that law is very recent – only about six months ago, iirc. Much of Europe has similar laws, and I think the European Court of Human Rights has acted against no-gays rules for some time also.
how is it that almost everyone has an exclusive preference for one or the other?
On what do you base this assertion?
On the actual topic of the thread, of course the BSA as a private club can exclude atheists and gays, if it likes. What I don’t understand is why it, or RonF, thinks that “but we’re the BSA!” means that it should get a sweetheart deal not available to other organizations, or that it should be treated any differently than any other private club whose rules conflict with antidiscrimination ordinances.
RonF.
Bonnie, if there’s no difference between same-sex sexual relations and disparate-sex sexual relations, how is it that almost everyone has an exclusive preference for one or the other?
In my post I addressed your term: “behavior”.
You seem now to be conflating physical behavior with the conditions of orientation, desire, attraction, and a whole host of other concepts by switching to the word “relations” (whatever that word means).
For millenia, poets, philosophers, and scientists have tried to figure out the nature of what attracts one person to another.
No one has yet figured that out, as you well know. (Or actually maybe you don’t.)
Based on interacting with and learning from other human beings, I can say with confidence that the feelings arising from my attractions to women are no different from men’s and women’s attractions to each other. The racing heartbeat, the flushed cheeks, the giggling, the sheer happiness when your “crush” comes into view, that realization that your “crush” now feels like someone you love, the feeling that you’re missing an arm or some other crucial part of your being when your love is away from you for an extended period – these seem like universals in the attraction context.
Perhaps you can explain what this was: at 12 years old when certain of my female friends talked to me I blushed and got all flustered. I began to realize I had crushes on them. Was I “straight” then? At 14 I understood these crushes were not “a phase” because they continued to happen – clearly I was attracted to other girls. How can you explain this in light of the fact that there was no sexual activity / behavior whatsoever going on? None until I was 19. Heck, I never dated or kissed a girl until I was 18. Yet I knew I was homosexual (maybe slightly bi – a few boys caught my eye but there was just never that spark with boy-crushes that I felt with girl-crushes).
Had I been a boy and in the Scouts at 14 and told a Scout Leader of my feelings, betcha I woulda been booted. All without actually engaging in any *shudder* “immoral” same-sex behavior – none until I was 18 – and again, only kissing (I was very shy).
Would I be wrong to assume that you did not have sex with your first crush the first moment you were attracted to the girl? If not, how did you know you weren’t gay? Even after you had sex with girls / women, how did you know you still weren’t gay? You never know ’til you try, right, if it’s ALL about behavior.
What about Ted Haggard? Was he straight because he had sex with his wife and fathered children with her? Did he suddenly become gay because of “behavior,” his sexual encounters with men? Or gee, maybe he’s bi, with a leaning more towards men but he chose to be with a woman because his church and his society expected that of him?
RonF.
Also, your extreme disingenuousness over your professed not understanding / not accepting the definition of the word “homophobia” is showing.
You participated in this post, Are Homophobes Really Repressing Homosexuality?, in which the concept of homophobia arises.
At comment #31 Skeptic888 writes, “RonF earlier asked for a link to the test that scales one’s homophobia” and posted the link.
On October 28th, 2005, at 8:57 am, in comment #33, you wrote, “Hm. Skeptic888, I took that quiz. Scored 60. So according to the authors of this quiz, I am officially homophobic.”
And here, over 2 years later, you are still quibbling that the word does not mean its currently accepted definition? Seriously?
(Are you unable to understand symbolic or figurative speech? Colloquialisms? If this is the case, I suggest you see your doctor to be evaluated for Asperger’s Syndrome so that you can be given some behavioral strategies for how better to interact with people who do understand those things.)
Well, since you don’t “believe” that “homophobia” means what (more than likely) the vast majority of English speakers in America understand it to mean – simply because the word parts don’t break down in your own personal dictionary the way you personally would like – I suppose, then, that you also have no idea what the following mean, either:
“Cancer stick” and “coffin nail” refer to cigarettes. But look up each word individually then put those definitions together and you won’t get that definition.
Or this formulation: “pussy wagon” – I bet that’s not in your dictionary, either – so you would quibble with the concept put forth in the movie “Grease” in “Greased Lightening.”
“Pickle smoker” – look that one up as individual words. Do you get “male homosexual” when the definitions of the individual words are put together? No.
“Coney Island Whitefish.” Nope, probably not in your dictionary, either. Nor in any icthyology texts.
I could go on.
But my point is that just because a word is not in your dictionary, or that a phrase does not break down into its component parts to re-aggregate in a particular way does not mean that millions of people do not understand a particular, or even several interlocking, non-dictionary meaning(s).
But further, “homophobia” as meaning irrational hated of homosexuals or those perceived as homosexuals IS recorded in many many locations. Why, Teh Google turns up roughly 600,000 English pages for “homophobia definition.” On the first page, above the fold, is a link to religioustolerance.org which lays it out rather nicely.
So anyway, your disingenuousness is extremely grating, demeaning, and insulting – particularly to those of use who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, poly, or otherwise some form of queer, and also to our allies as well.
Grow up, get some empathy.
Please stop with the bullshit nonsense.
Hey, Bonnie? Please stick to disagreeing with RonF without using Asperger’s as a synonym for “you’re a fucking asshole”. It’s not cute or clever.
Hey, mythago? That was not my point at all. I’m 100% sincere – Many people with Asperger’s do not understand symbolic or figurative language. Sorry that you misread me.
Also, hey mythago? Fear not – if I meant to say “you’re a fucking asshole” I certainly would have used exactly those words.
I do so when necessary.
Hey, Bonnie? That’s what’s called “concern trolling”. Dropping ‘maybe you said that idiotic thing because something is wrong with you, poor thing, you could benefit from help’ is not a sincere expression of concern. It’s particularly glaring when, as you did, it’s phrased as “if you run along and have your little problem taken care of, you can come be with the normal folks who understand these things.”
I mean, come the fuck on.
Back off.
What I don’t understand is why it, or RonF, thinks that “but we’re the BSA!” means that it should get a sweetheart deal not available to other organizations,
The unavailability of a deal of this nature to other organizations has not been demonstrated. Should some other organization come up with a building to swap for a break on property rental and get denied, then fine – I’d say that in that case the BSA got special privileges. But this wasn’t a one-way sweetheart deal – a swap was made. The City got a building in perpetuity and the BSA got a rental break in perpetuity. Now the City still has the building, but the BSA is out. Sure, the city had every legal right to do what it did. But that doesn’t change the fact that the City kept what it had been given but reneged on the deal.
Laws change, attitudes change, circumstances change. The City and the BSA freely entered into a deal. Now the City wants to break it. I don’t like that, but I understand it. The City has to comply with it’s own laws. But, then, do it honestly. As long as the City has the benefit of that building but the BSA has lost the benefit they were given in exchange (and in fact loses out since they’ll now have the expenses of moving and either paying rental somewhere else or purchasing and building), the City has dishonored itself.
But this wasn’t a one-way sweetheart deal – a swap was made.
RonF, again, where are you getting “deal” from? There was a city ordinance allowing the $1 rent, which as far as anyone knows was extended only to BSA. BSA voluntarily fixed up the building. The city gave BSA three years’ warning about the $1 rent going away, and is looking into compensating BSA for the work it did on the building.
I asked you once to point to a contract, deal or terms thereof, because that’s not anywhere in the article. You still haven’t done it, or really done much other than to say “not fair!”
Bonnie,
I take your word that your intentions were good.
Despite your intentions, however, the comment read to me — and, I suspect, to most readers — as if you were trying to use Asperger’s as an insult, which is not appropriate on “Alas.” Please avoid making similar comments in the future.
I actually agree with Ron on a couple of things.
1) The BSA is not a hate group. It has some hateful policies, but promoting hate is not its primary purpose.
2) The term homophobia is problematic for various reasons, among them:
– it comes from two Greek roots, homo, same, and phobia, fear — but it isn’t fear of the same, or people who are the same, but fear and hatred of people who are different (in a particular way).
– it medicalizes bigotry, implying that while the fear is irrational, it’s also something that people can’t help and for which they need treatment. We don’t call racism melanophobia or sexism gynophobia.
Nonetheless, any reasonable adult of good will is perfectly capable of understanding what homophobia means in common usage.
Here’s my primary difference (to put it mildly) with Ron: the city of Philadelphia did not break its agreement, it made the agreement contingent on the BSA’s compliance with a law that wasn’t in effect when the agreement was made. As numerous commenters have already pointed out, this happens all the time. The BSA has had ample opportunity to comply with the law, but maintaining its antigay policy and its appalling premise that gay people are bad and dirty is, incredibly, more important to it than complying with the antidiscrimination law, or saving a lot of money, or maintaining programs for needy children.
How anyone can defend such an organization is far, far beyond me.
Lu – if #1 is true, then why can’t the BSA drop their hate policy and keep their $1 lease?
They certainly have a lot more important things to do…but if the hate isn’t their purpose, and there would be such benefits to quitting it, why don’t they quit?
I can only conclude that they actually really mean it, really love their hate, couldn’t give hate up for all the money in the world. Does that make them a hate group?
I hear what you’re saying, Thene — but contrast the BSA with the KKK, for example. The primary purpose, the only purpose, for the KKK’s existence is to harass and terrorize African-Americans and to spread malicious propaganda. The BSA’s primary purpose is to teach and foster the moral development of boys through activities like camping and community service.
Admirable though that purpose may be, I won’t support the BSA by so much as buying a Christmas wreath unless and until it gets that tree trunk out of its eye.
I don’t see how you can foster anyone else’s moral development when your own morals are so bankrupt; but that’s still not the same as existing for the sole purpose of spreading hate. (And as far as I can tell neither the national organization nor individual dens or troops promulgate an antigay or anti-atheist message around the campfire; they just hope the subject won’t come up.)
how is it that almost everyone has an exclusive preference for one or the other?
I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a little thing called socialisation, have you RonF? Yeesh.
Bonnie:
Ampersand:
It didn’t read like that to me. To me, it looks ill-informed, condescending, and perhaps unintendedly-insulting. But, maybe that’s because, as an Aspie, I’m more inclined to read it literally.
I’m not sure where this idea comes from of Aspies being “unable to understand symbolic or figurative speech [or] Colloquialisms”. I don’t have any problems in this regard, at least, I don’t think I do. Nor do I recognise such a deficit in other Aspies. Rather, the idea seems to me to be more like a neurotypical person’s misinterpretation of how Aspies think: It’s not that we don’t understand these forms of speech, it’s that we handle ambiguity differently. Aspies tend to look at each possible interpretation, reject those which are clearly untenable, then then either ask for clarification if there is more than one left, or perhaps respond to each tenable interpretation in turn. How often have you seen me write a comment along the lines of “If you meant A, then… else if you meant B, then…”? And yes, I do tend to go with a literal interpretation, provided it’s tenable.
Neurotypical people, on the other hand… Well, I don’t really know how neurotypicals think. To me it looks like they just respond to their best guess at an interpretation. Nor does it appear that they guess right any more often than I would if I did the same. But what do I know of neurotypical thought?
Regardless, I don’t get the impression that Bonnie has had many dealings with Aspies. Rather, she seems to have taken this description and just applied it to some writing she’s seen on the net. Ironically, someone with the comprehension deficits she seems to think Aspies have would be unable to understand the phrase “see your doctor”.
Where it gets condescending is with the idea that we should or even could just see a doctor to help fix her (presumed) problem with us. In my experience Doctors are generally as clueless as everyone else about Asperger’s, and frequently add their own particular brand of professional arrogance to it, though that’s certainly not true for all of them. In fact, Aspies do develop “behavioral strategies for how better to interact with” neurotypical people in a neurotypical world. If she has a problem with us, she could always try developing some behavioural strategies of her own.
BSA voluntarily fixed up the building.
It was not a pre-existing building that the BSA moved into and fixed up. The BSA built the building from scratch. The BSA didn’t build it somewhere else and then truck it onto the property later. There had to be some kind of deal in place from the beginning, even if it was only an understanding until the ordinance was passed and the gift of the building was made. Was there a written contract? No. Was there a deal cut between representatives of the City and the local BSA Council? Yes. The city gets a building, the local Council gets essentially free rent.
Now, I don’t know which came first – “We’ll put up a building and give it over if you give us free rent of a spot to put it” or “If we give you free rent, will you put your HQ on it and give us the building”? But it certainly wasn’t “Here’s free rent on a piece of property” and “Oh, hey, thanks – say, how about if we put a building up and give it to you? What do you think?” or “We’d like to build a building and give it to the city” “Great! Say, how about if we give you free rent on a spot to put it?” There was a deal. Not legally enforcable, but a deal none the less. As I say, I understand the exigencies that caused the City to say “We have to follow our own laws – change your policies or get out”. But there’s nothing in that law that says that the City can’t close the deal out in an honest fashion.
BTW, upthread I made a few postings that include content indicating that the City has had other tenants in that building besides the BSA. I came to suspect I was misinformed and called the CoL Council to check. I was misinformed. I apologize for that.
Lu, in my 27 years in the BSA I have had the subject come up exactly twice outside the parameters of discussing these various lawsuits. One was actually well prior to the controversies, back when I was 17 and one of my fellow Scouts came into my cabin, put his hand on my leg and propositioned me – that would have been in July or August of 1969. I was a good-looking kid back in the day – ah, the ravages of time …. The other time was a few years ago during a Scoutmaster conference (when a Boy Scout is going to advance in rank, he sits down with his Scoutmaster and discusses what he’s been up to in Scouting – and life for that matter – and what his plans are), when a kid just brought up on his own what a bad think gays in Scouting would be. Mind you, if you had said to me 5 minutes before that, “Ron, one of the kids in the Troop is gay, which one do you think it is” I’d have pointed to him immediately, so, who knows where that came from.
It doesn’t come up. It just doesn’t come up. Kids join Cub Scouts when they are 6 and Boy Scouts when they are 11. It isn’t something we talk about with them at all and very, very little with the adults (and then only if they bring it up). During meetings and outing we don’t talk about sex at all – we talk about the stuff you need to do to pass the requirements of the various ranks and badges and how you do your job as Patrol Leader or whatever. It isn’t 1984; we don’t have the 5-minute hate every meeting. And based on what I overhear of the conversations the kids have when they think we’re not listening, they don’t talk about sex in general and homosexuality in particular on their own much either.
Thene:
I’ve been thinking about this one quite a bit since I wrote my last response. It seems screamingly obvious to me that the BSA could drop its discriminatory policies and fulfill its primary mission just as well — better, in fact, since the major kinks in its own morality would be straightened* out. To me it seems like a no-brainer.
Yet it has declined to do so, at great cost to the organization and its stated primary mission. It seems that it believes the exclusion of gay people and atheists to be central to its identity.
I still have trouble seeing the Boy Scouts as a hate group, probably because I associate it with the innocence (ignorance?) of my childhood, and because I’ve known a lot of Scouts and Scoutmasters who were good people who had no intention of supporting bigotry. I’m glad I don’t have a son who wants to join, though.
*Way before this came up, I’d become uncomfortable with using the word straight to mean heterosexual. These days I use heterosexual or het much more often. The opposite of straight is bent, kinked, crooked, twisted, and (to me at least, and it seems also to the BSA) using straight to mean heterosexual implies at least in some degree that these pejoratives apply to gay people.
My last post crossed with Ron’s last two. I’ll let it stand and address his points specifically.
What’s dishonest about requiring the BSA to comply with the law?
Then why is it so hard for the BSA to change these policies? People really, really dislike admitting that they were wrong, especially in a way that harmed others, but there seems to be more to it than that. (I don’t like the anti-atheist policy either, as you know, but I’m trying to resist straying from the topic.)
There had to be some kind of deal in place from the beginning
Let’s assume there actually was a deal. What were the terms of that deal, and how has the city violated them, particularly in light of its willingness to try to repay BSA for its work?
Wait a second…
1) Thank you all for ceasing to erroniously claim that there was a lease.
2) Ron says there was a deal. The deal was, the BSA gets free rent in perpetuity, and Philly gets…what? Official ownership of a building that they can’t use because it’s filled with boy scouts? A deal implies quid pro quo, and I’m not seeing a lot of quo here.
3) I don’t see why there was necessarily a deal involved. Why can’t it just have been, “Hey, Boy Scouts, we like the cut of your jib, here’s some land to do your thing on”? Governments make grants like this all the time; I don’t see why we should assume it was different in this case. In fact, usually there is the understanding (but not the obligation) that the grantee will continue to fulfill the goals of the grantor; something which is obviously no longer the case in this instance.
4) Even if there was a deal, is anybody seriously suggesting that either party should continue to be bound by a decades-old back-room handshake deal between some unknown dude in the BSA and some unknown dude in the city? Generally in this society we enumerate the conditions of our deals (and write them down on paper) for several good reasons, some of which include allowing for external review of the deal, making sure that both parties understand exactly what the terms of the deal are, and ensuring that the details of the deal don’t change over time. Seeing as how none of this was done, I have a hard time seeing why Philly should honor the deal (if there was one) according to what RonF or the BSA says it was.
RonF:
Few separate points here:
1. While I appreciate that it ‘doesn’t come up’, the simple statistical truth is that it’s likely that perhaps 9% of the scouts are (or will be) either gay or bisexual. (A figure I’m getting from a relatively recent BBC survey of 25000 self-selecting participants aged between 16 and 24 – it’s not academic sociology, but the sample size is so huge that it’s the figure I tend to use for current orientation spread). Speaking as a bisexual woman who grew up in an area where ‘it didn’t come up’, and where queer people were slurred upon, excluded and usually just wound up moving away, that silence is choking, isolating and bad for mental and sexual health.
2. Two closely related news pieces about Girl Guiding UK:
First, they asked 1000 guides what skills they’d like to learn more about from their Guide troop. The top results for Guides aged 16+? Financial management, public speaking and safe sex. One of the top results for Guides aged 10-15 was ‘standing up to boys’ – a subject that I think could fairly be contracted simply to ‘feminism’. (I’d be really interested to know if any similar surveys had been done in the USA, or if Boy Scouts of any nation had been surveyed).
Secondly, a few words about the Guiding peer educator program. It includes sexual health, abortion, date rape, alcohol use, and body image/eating disorder education.
What’s clearly going on with that is that the girls and young women are asking their Guiders for help with things – mostly practical things – they really want to know but aren’t learning in school. That includes advice about sex, gender and the body. You can’t map the needs of British girls right onto those of American boys, but I think it does demonstrate that the oldest children involved in Guiding and Scouting are quite sexually aware and do need way more support with that than they get in schools or from their families – and if the group has a policy of excluding people who are (in 9% of cases) like them, do you think that’s going to ‘come up’?
Of course not. It’s just going to lead to more isolation and fear of adult society in those G, B and T Scouts. And it is a minority matter, so clearly they should worry more about financial management and assembling furniture instead. But excluding people on sexual grounds is inevitably going to impact on that 9%, right when they need support and advice about sex. Don’t force it to ‘come up’, sure, but the exclusion policy is clearly a danger to these young people.
3. The image of discrimination – be it homophobia or racism or any other form of discrimination – as being a matter of ‘5 minute hate’ is a caricature that’s commonly used to distract from real discrimination. Rudy Giuliani’s not a racist! He doesn’t do 5 minute hate against blacks at his campaign meetings! It’s just a coincidence that absolutely all of his campaign staff are white! See? Silent exclusion is a common way of carrying out discrimination, as it’s relatively stealthy, hard to outlaw, and means that no one has to own up to their discrimination. It’s still hate.
Ron, refusing to include gay people because they’re unclean is fucking filthy and you know it.
It’s immoral and unethical and hateful and inhuman and you know it.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the troops spend a lot of time hating on gay folks at their meetings, any more than it would matter whether a group that excluded black people or women or Irish people or Jews or liberals or immigrants or any other group because they’re unclean spent a lot of time talking about it.
They’d still be doing it, and it would still be nauseating and hypocritical.
And you know it.
—Myca
A (partial) list of groups that, functionally or as a matter of policy, discriminate against gays: BSA, the Catholic church, several of the world’s other major religions, US Army (and all other branches of the US military), the Republican party, many adoption agencies…the list is long.
Is anybody seriously going to argue that all of the above are hate groups? Because if you are, I think you are diluting the meaning of “hate group” to the point where it’s not very useful any more. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t hateful individuals in (and sometimes running) those groups. But there are also people who just haven’t given it a lot of thought, or who are mistaken in their understanding of what it means to be gay, or who think that fighting about it is useless or harmful at present, or who feel that the group in question does more good than harm and therefore deserves support. And I don’t see these latter people as being hateful. (Which isn’t to say that ignorance excuses bad behavior. But ignorance is a lot easier to cure than hate.)
I don’t care too much about the nomenclature, whether we call the BSA a hate group or not.
I’m perfectly willing to treat them exactly the same as I would treat (frex) The Lions Club or the Kiwanis if the Lions Club or the Kiwanis didn’t allow black or Jewish members because black people and Jews are filthy.
I think quibbling over whether they’re primarily a hate group or just a group with mostly laudable goals who also considers vile bigotry an integral part of their identity is counterproductive.
I would point out, however, that they do consider their hate integral to who they are as an organization, to the point that they’ll make decisions that are counter to their own financial best interest as long as that choice preserves their ability to discriminate, long after their fellow scouting organizations have stopped.
—Myca
Thene, really great comment.
I have a nit-pick, though:
It doesn’t matter how huge the sample size is; a really big survey with fatal design flaws is no better than a small survey with fatal design flaws. For this subject, a self-selected sample makes the results meaningless.
That said, I don’t think it matters at all to your point. The Scouts claim that one in four boys in the US become boy scouts at some point. Even if that’s an exaggeration, and even if only 1% of boys ever experiences same-sex attractions, that would still be a huge number of boys.
Even if there was a deal, is anybody seriously suggesting that either party should continue to be bound by a decades-old back-room handshake deal between some unknown dude in the BSA and some unknown dude in the city?/
It likely started out as what was known back in the day as a “gentleman’s agreement”, but it didn’t stay that way; a by all accounts legally-enforcable conveyance of the building to the City and a City ordinance moved it to public view and legal records. And I’ve said they shouldn’t continue to be bound to it. What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be closed out in a one-sided fashion, where one side retains the benefits and even improves their position, and the other side loses all benefits and then has more losses.
It likely started out as what was known back in the day as a “gentleman’s agreement”
So, again, you keep harping on a “deal” and an “agreement,” and you don’t even know *what* it was. And again, the City gave BSA years’ notice that they would have to pay the same lease as everybody else, and is considering ways to reimburse BSA for the work they did to the building. So other than thinking that the BSA should be allowed to keep its $1 sweetheart deal, what is your point?
Re Berkeley, if there was an actual agreement that BSA relied upon–we provide this stone, you give us these boat docks–then there is a potential contract, and they can sue for a breach. Favors do not create contracts, though.
Lu: Just as a point of clarification, this deal that’s the subject of this dispute wasn’t between the City and the BSA, it was between the City and the local council of the BSA. At one point the local council wanted to adopt a no-discrimination policy so that they would be in complicance with the city’s ordinances, but the national BSA office put the kibosh on it. So, the local council is finding itself between the proverbial rock and hard place.
RonF: When I was a boy scout back in the late sixties, sex was a very frequent topic of conversation at campouts, at least when the adult leaders weren’t in earshot. I’d be surprised if that’s not the case now.
So other than thinking that the BSA should be allowed to keep its $1 sweetheart deal, what is your point
Mythago, show me once where I’ve said that the BSA should be allowed to stay in the building and continue to pay $1 a year rent.
So, again, you keep harping on a “deal” and an “agreement,” and you don’t even know *what* it was.
How the arrangement was made is unclear, but the result isn’t. The City gets a building and the BSA Council gets cheap rent. Certainly no one’s denying it.
So other than thinking that the BSA should be allowed to keep its $1 sweetheart deal, what is your point
Mythago, show me once where I’ve said that the BSA should be allowed to stay in the building and continue to pay $1 a year rent. And my point is clear; the City right now stands as having dealt quite dishonestly with the BSA by reneging on the deal without reimbursing them.
and is considering ways to reimburse BSA for the work they did to the building.
One City Councillor has stated that he’s going to ask that this be considered. I have yet to see that the issue has in fact come before the City and that they have decided to consider it. So I think that you overstate the situation. Also, this should have been worked out before they broke the deal, not afterwards.
Additionally, your phrasing has repeatedly ignored the fact that the BSA didn’t just do some maintenance on the building, they built it in the first place. Do you not see a distinction?
Ron, kindly reread what Mythago wrote above.
If the agreement was, “the City gets a building and the BSA Council gets cheap rent,” then, well, the BSA got 80 years of cheap rent, and according to all of the math I’ve seen, that far exceeds the value of the building.
I’m not sure why you think the BSA is owed anything.
If there’s another “deal” or “agreement” you think was made, what was it, and where was it written down?
—Myca
RonF: You keep reiterating how dishonest it was for the city to do this. But I fail to see what was so dishonest about it. It’s the city’s land. If I leased that land (a much more honest and clear arrangement that the “back-room deal” you keep insisting existed and somehow has legal and ethical merit), even at full price, and then built a building on it… well, I would lose the building when I failed to meet the terms of the lease. Even if those terms got changed by law and were not in the original contract.
You also keep insisting that there must have been some kind of deal, but we have no evidence of that other than your insistence. And all the evidence we have suggests that the city said: “Hey BSA, we’re going to give you a sweet deal on this piece of land.” And sometime later the BSA responded with: “Cool, Philly, we’re really grateful. Hey, can we build a building on this site?” That does not imply, suggest, or even require some kind of deal.
It does require a consistent string of bad choices, though, which the BSA seems really insistent on making. First, they would have had legal standing had they gotten an actual lease at any point before this situation arose. Second, they would have had further legal merit if they had gotten some written contractual arrangement to protect their investment of time and money in the building, again at any point before this situation arose. Third, they would have had ethical standing had they chosen not to endorse and embrace discriminatory policies. Fourth, they would have earned some protection from the laws that were enacted to protect them if they had chosen to renounce the aforementioned discrimination or paid fair rent. They chose to do none of these things.
Instead, they chose to keep making bad choices and now you (and they) seem to think that they deserve protection from those bad choices… even while you maintain that those were somehow good choices despite the fact that they clearly were not.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Sailorman Writes:
I don’t know or understand too much about contracts or leases, just the basics from my business law classes, but if the Boy Scouts were using the building and the city gave it to them to use, then obviously there was some sort of contract that was in existence between the two parties.
The questions now are these: Under what terms can either side break the agreement? What are the consequences for either side to break the agreement? How can the agreement be legally broken by either side? I don’t think the answers to these questions are as clear cut as some would like to believe that they are and this is why the city and the BS are going to have to hammer this thing out.
Obviously, this isn’t the first sort of agreement in this country to occur between a not-for-profit organization and a city government so I have to assume that in other cases across the country the two sides normally come to some sort of amicable agreement to break the contract when circumstances change.
I think that what you’re claiming here is untrue, and in fact, as far as I can tell, that’s sort of the point of the last 100-something comments.
That is, lots of people keep claiming ‘there had to be a contract/lease/whatever,’ and still nobody has been able to present evidence of one or explain what one would entail. Since that’s the case, I’d like to suggest that there wasn’t a contract, and thus that the city isn’t breaking it.
Rather than a contract, it seems pretty clear that the city was offering the BSA a sweetheart deal on taxpayer subsidized rent. That was all fine in the early 20th century, but as the BSA’s bigotry has become more clear (and, honestly, as they’ve become greater bigots. The BSA has changed over the years, and not for the better) the city decided that they didn’t want to offer them this deal any longer.
The BSA had no problem with a sweetheart deal because they’re Real Nice Guys, so now that it’s become clear that they’re not Real Nice Guys (and are instead Big Fucking Bigots), they lose the deal.
*shrug*
If you live on your reputation, you die on your reputation.
Don’t like it? Don’t do it.
—Myca
As Myca has noted, that’s far from obvious. I do all SORTS of things which are not under contract. So do cities, and so do the Scouts.
Furthermore, some agreements require certain types of form to be valid and binding. Some must be in writing, some must be renewed, or signed by certain parties, or recorded, etc. Some contracts can also be invalidated by law (e.g. whites-only.)
I have no particular knowledge of PA law, but to date I have seen nothing that suggests there was a contract.
Well, normally the two sides HAVE a contract. And half the reason of having a contract is to agree what happens if/when someone wants to break it: who pays, who walks, etc.
OK. Wow. I followed this entire comment thread, and wow.
My thoughts that haven’t already been expressed by others:
1.) If the BSA feels cheated by the arrangement, let them litigate it. Sure, that’s expensive, but that’s life as a national organization…and it hasn’t hurt those needy kids in the past when they’ve spent those Christmas wreath and popcorn dollars to sue for their right to discriminate. They also have a sufficiently savvy legal team that if they think they have a prayer of winning a suit under contract law in the jurisdiction, they will litigate it, and even if they don’t, they’ll use it (or it will be used, independent of their actions) as more “The Left Hates Scouting, Mom & God” propaganda in the media. Myself, I don’t think they’ve got a prayer, but I know nil about their particular state and its law, nor do I know enough about the history here to argue the principles of implied contract. I don’t do legal research in my spare time; I betcha BSA has plenty of paralegals to do that for them. I’ll be keeping an eye out to see what comes of this, just because now I’m curious as to whether they fight it or not.
2.) Many past Scouts are ashamed of or angered by the BSA’s staunch refusal to reconsider their stance on homosexuality. I like to think past Scouts who are no longer with us would join in those feelings. Heinlein praised the BSA all his life; I doubt he’d be pleased to see their image deteriorate in this way, or to see children who could benefit from Scouting who don’t, because Mommy thinks it’s important that Bobby understands about Uncle Stan and why having a group where Uncle Stan wouldn’t be allowed is uncool.
3.) The GSA doesn’t discriminate against gays & lesbians, and they get my support, what little I’m able to give. The BSA has a right to slant their policies as they choose, and also the right to take the consequences. Of course, Spielberg withdrawing his financial support probably mattered more. If the GSA started discriminating against gays & lesbians, I’d stop buying cookies.
4.) I know from my admittedly limited experience with current Boy Scouts that they are just as likely to describe things they don’t like as “gay” as other, non Scout boys of their age. I have a problem with that, as that’s not really behavior befitting a Scout. Gay bashing does not count as a good deed, nor is it “clean”, and is it possible that this policy means that adults are even less likely to teach their Scouts why that behavior is not acceptable, either for fear of reprisal by the organization or simply because they don’t want to deal with explaining the inherent contradiction there?
5.) I wish my state had laws that would let them oust antigay groups from our schools. Of course, my state is forever getting in trouble for Missing the Point on church-state separation…despite the First Amendment Center being headquartered here. The magistrates in my county got in trouble recently for leaving their posts unattended on Sundays to step out for church…on county time. Apparently they’ve been doing just that since God knows when. (I wouldn’t care at all if they were doing it on lunch breaks, but Sunday magistrates are part-time. They were taking four-hour checks for three hours of work or less, and leaving people to wait to be bonded or arraigned until they got done over at church.) It’s so casual and part of the culture here that it’s almost impossible to stop. (In the case of the magistrates, the county attorney just told them they’d be fired if they left during their shift for anything other than an emergency, period, and left the reasons (and the public fight over them) out of it.)
I was only speaking specifically to the question that Sailorman posed to me, not all of the comments on the thread.
And once again, let me say that the courts will determine if there was or wasn’t a contract and if so, whether it was or wasn’t broken. The original post on this thread clearly states that ” The Boy Scouts erected the ornate building and since 1928 have leased the land from the city for a token sum of $1 a year.” Emphasis mine. A lease is a contract by any measure of the law so it will be up to a court somewhere to claim that the lease can in fact be broken and under what terms the two sides will have to agree to if they can’t agree between themselves. Further down in the same article it states “The Boy Scouts skirted the requirement by never having had to sign a lease because they were given use of the building by city ordinance in the 1920s.” But what exactly does that mean? Was there a lease despite the fact that no actual lease was signed, contradicting other parts of the same article, or was there some sort of de facto lease because of the city ordinance?
Can the same city resind on its part of an agreement by later changing its laws, and if so under what terms?
Whether the deal was sweet or not, a deal is a deal. And unless it violates the law, a deal is a contract.
Which is all fine and dandy but that just leaves us back where we started. After over 80 years of the BSA renting/leasing/whatevering-you-want-to-call-it on this land, where does that leave the BSA and where does it leave the city as far as what each is due since there don’t seem to be any provisions that were made when the BSA initially moved onto the land as to what would happen when the city no longer wanted them there.
Ah, I see your confusion.
What you said above is just not true.
Pretty much period.
—Myca
Post removed
Sailorman Writes:
Does a contract have to have provisions for what happens in case someone doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain? Can a contract exist that doesn’t have these provisions?
Jamila said – “Does a contract have to have provisions for what happens in case someone doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain? Can a contract exist that doesn’t have these provisions?”
I don’t know about CAN, but I can say that I have never ever seen one that does NOT have provisions for what happens if one party does not uphold their end of the bargain, and I’ve been dealing exclusivly with federal, state, and private contracts for the last year and a half or so.
As Kate said.
A contract can be simple and fairly abstract. This is a contract:
But simple usually means “subject to interpretation.”
And “subject to interpretation” frequently means “interpreted in opposite ways by the two parties.”
And THAT means, often enough, “ends up in litigation.”
So because “simple” = “ends up in litigation,” good lawyers tend to put a lot of details in. Usually those details include some way to assess damages, breach, etc, because that just makes things better for everyone in the long run.
Anyway:
It pretty much leaves them in a similar position as they would be if the BSA were anyone else, and/or the city was a different city. Back to square one.
It’s just as if I had a one year lease with you, but I kept renewing it for 79 more years. If, in Year 80, i decided not to renew, what then? You’re out of luck: you should have signed an 81-year lease, or you should have insisted on a clause permitting you to renew at will.
Now change that a bit. I have a lease with you for $1/year. Every January, you and I sign a new lease for $1 for the next year. This time, I refuse; I want $1000. What happens? Same as above, you’re out of luck: you should have signed an 81-year lease, or you should have insisted on a clause permitting you to renew at will for $1/year.
That’s similar to what happened here, I think. The BSA appears to have had/made a series of short term deals with the city–perhaps a short lease, perhaps no lease at all. But they don’t appear to have secured a long term obligation (e.g. long term lease,) nor do they appear to have secured a right of renewal if they had a short term lease.
There are many valid reasons why, once the arrangement existed, the BSA would not try to secure their position better. in particular, they may have balanced the risk of non-renewal against the risk of coming into the public eye. Perhaps they worried that changing things would cause someone, somewhere, to realize that the city held the cards. Who knows?
Whether the deal was sweet or not, a deal is a deal. And unless it violates the law, a deal is a contract.
And here you are back with RonF, insisting that there must be a “deal” or a “contract”, even though there isn’t one and you can’t articulate what the terms of that “deal” are.
but if the Boy Scouts were using the building and the city gave it to them to use, then obviously there was some sort of contract that was in existence between the two parties
Flatly not true. Sorry.
mythago Writes:
Sure I can. All I have to do is read the city ordinance that granted the BSA usage of the land in the first place. The article also goes on to state “On May 31, the City Council voted 16-to-1 to authorize ending the lease….” If nothing resembling a lease existed then there would have been nothing to vote on ending.
It flatly is true. Sorry.
The BSA is not some homeless Joe Shmoe claiming squatters rights in some abandoned building that the city forgot about. The BSA was there 80 years, paid rent to the city-even if it was only $1 a year-, and built a building there which it maintained.
You’ve already explained that you don’t have much knowledge of contracts, but are you a lawyer, Jamila?
I ask because you’re contradicting (I believe) two lawyers with what you’re writing here, and I’d like to know how much stock we ought to put in your opinion.
—Myca
It would help to know exactly what the ordinance that the Philadelphia City Council adopted 80 years ago says. If it grants the boy scouts the right to erect a building on city property and to occupy it in return for $1.00/yr rent, that’s not a contract (and even if it is a contract, in most places in the U.S. contracts involving real estate–other than a lease for less than one year’s duration–have to be in writing). If, on the other hand, the ordinance authorizes a representative of the city to enter into an agreement with the boy scouts, whatever agreement was entered into may constitute a contract, but again, if it wasn’t in writing, it has probably ceased to be enforceable.
The local BSA council _may_ have a detrimental reliance argument along the lines that in spending the money to erect and maintain the building, the BSA council detrimentally relied on the city’s promise that if they did so, it could occupy the building in perpetuity for $1/yr rent. However, in calculating its damages, if any, the court would probably have to consider the fact that the council has also benefited by being able to occupy the building essentially rent free for 80 years, so it could end up being a wash.
All I have to do is read the city ordinance that granted the BSA usage of the land in the first place.
Very good. What does that ordinance say? And what were the terms of the lease, such that you can confidently assert the City violated them?
It flatly is true. Sorry.
No, it is actually not the case that if the City allowed the BSA to use the building, there was “some sort of contract”. As you’d know if you really paid attention in your class, “contract” has a very specific meaning.
Still waiting to hear exactly what terms of the contract the City violated. All I keep hearing is “BSA! BSA!”
Myca Writes:
Nope.
You don’t have to put any stock in my opinion, although I put more stock in my own opinion than what I would put into two lawyers from the internet that I’ve never met who don’t seem to have read the city ordinance in question. The best I can hope for is that you take my opinion as a starting point and then do your own research by reading the ordinance that initially gave the BSA usage of the land. Next you can follow that up by reading the minutes of the meeting during which the city council voted to end a lease which you are asserting never existed in the first place.
So I guess the question comes full circle: How much stock should I put into what you or the two lawyers are saying if none of you have–as of yet anyways–read the ordinance giving the BSA a right to be on the land ?
Since I’m about as great of an internet researcher as I am of a lawyer can anyone here find a link to the actual ordinance giving the BSA usage of the land and a link to information about the city council meeting where the BSA was kicked out of the building that they allegedly had no lease on ?
mythago Writes:
At no point in this thread have I confidently asserted that the city violated the lease. I have asserted that there has to have been a lease or some sort of contract allowing the BSA usage of the land in the first place; but, according to the article, even the city hasn’t tried to say that the BSA had no right to be in the building, only that due to a new city ordinance the BSA has to get out of the building now or pay full-priced rent.
Yes, it is actually the case that in order for the city to allow the BSA usage of the land there had to be some sort of contract. Last I heard, folks couldn’t just move their enterprise into a building owned by a city, pay rent to the city that the city accepted, and yet there could be no lease or contract.
The simplest definition of a contract is ” a legally enforceable agreement.” Contracts don’t have to be complicated, although they can be. And a contract does not have to spell out every little excruciating detail in order to remain a contract. As Sailorman, a lawyer, has already pointed out a contract can be ” simple and fairly abstract.”
From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/us/06scouts.html?em&ex=1197262800&en=534f254f49c4457d&ei=5087
Ms. Sobel said the city required that any organization that rented property from it agree to nondiscriminatory language in its lease. The Boy Scouts skirted the requirement by never having had to sign a lease because they were given use of the building by city ordinance in the 1920s.
There. No lease.
However, three paragraphs later:
On May 31, the City Council voted 16-to-1 to authorize ending the lease, though Mr. Clarke and other Council members continued trying to negotiate a settlement.
There. A lease.
I hope I’ve helped to settle this argument with aid from journalism at its finest.
You can see the most recent resolution here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2176410
The important bit says:
WHEREAS, Pursuant to the terms of permission granted to the Boy Scouts, the building and property is to be surrendered to the city within one year after a notice of desire to terminate given by the Commissioners of Fairmount Park, with the approval of the Mayor and City Council…
It looks like the city followed the letter of the “terms of permission” granted in 1928, so you can stop attacking the city now.
(Of course, I can’t actually find the “terms of permission” from 1928 anywhere, so who knows? Maybe the council is lying with this resolution. If anybody can find the original, I’d love to see it.)
Interesting in a related way:
Via Metafilter, I find this blog by a long-time scoutmaster, where he talks about (among other things), his attitude towards the BSA’s policy of discrimination towards Atheists and gays. He credits this policy largely with the BSA’s 23.5% (as of 2005) drop in membership since 1997.
What I find heartbreaking is how many people comment in the original Metafilter thread to say, “I’m an Eagle Scout. My father was an Eagle Scout. This was a big part of my life, but I just can’t support the BSA any more.”
My father was an Eagle Scout. My children will not be.
I want all the apologists out there to ask themselves whether or not this is something that makes sense.
Is holding your hate close more important than the future of scouting?
—Myca
Jamila Akil said:
Just because you haven’t heard of it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Like you said, you’re not a lawyer.
As for the discussion on the use of the term “lease”: Jamila, you seem to keep assuming that the word “lease” solely means “a standing contract” in common parlance (which happens to be the linguistic style journalists often rely upon) when most people use it interchangeably with the word “rent”. Just because the article mentions the word “lease”, does not mean that there was an actual contract.
In fact, as Jake Squid points out above, the actual wording of the resolution refers to the arrangement as “terms of permission” which supports the already much-reiterated point that there never was a “lease” as per the legalistic, contractual definition of the word.
Myca, re: comment #157, I whole heartedly concur. I was a girl scout for years and as the girl scouts have no policy of discrimination against lesbians, I don’t have a problem if my daughter chooses to join (and I’ll encourage her to try it because I think it is a valuable experience). However, if I ever have a son, he will not be permitted to join the Boy Scouts because of their policy, and that is exceedingly sad – both for my mythical potential future son and for the Boy Scouts. :(
Best. Comment. Ever.
From http://scoutmaster.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/lets_revisit_th.html
How about if we only let in homosexuals who don’t have an agenda?
Damn. I have a really nice Hermes agenda too. It’s ostrich skin. I’d hate to have to give it up. But I tell you, how do they expect me to “be prepared” if I can’t keep my appointments straight! And my PDA is so not appropriate for formal occasions.
Sure they can.
It happens all the time in residential settings. It is similar to (or in fact is) a “tenancy at will” depending on the situation. Google that phrase if you want more information on what it means.
It’s less common, but still reasonably frequent, to have those in commercial settings. I haven’t personally run into any in a municipal setting but I have no reason to believe they are forbidden.
Incidentally: Not that I mind explaining things, but if your general opinion of me is “some random lawyer on the Internet who is too stupid to read the lease” or the equivalent, then let me know so i can stop wasting my time.
Come on now, Sailorman! Have you ever heard of a “tenancy at will” existing for 80 years? What about the fact that the article clearly states that the city council voted to end the “lease”?*
I wasn’t trying to imply that you were stupid, ’cause I haven’t read the city ordinance either. My point is that all of us here have access to the exact same article that clearly states a city ordinance gave the BSA usage of the land and that the city voted to terminate the “lease”.
If all of us have access to the exact same information from the article and we all have the ability to use the internet to do basic research to find out what the terms “lease” and “contract” mean, why would I accept the opinion of any lawyer as carrying more weight than my own when we both know the exact same thing about the case in question?
I respect your opinion and I apologize if I came off as rude or calling you ( or the other lawyers here) stupid.
*NOTE: I just wanted to add that I saw in one of your most recent posts on this thread that there could have been a short-term lease agreement between the BSA and the city council. Hopefully, others on this thread will come around to understanding that there is a very distinct possibility that a lease agreement existed in light of your own statement about a possible lease agreement and the fact that the article states there was a lease agreement.
What about the fact, as Jake Squid pointed out, that the article also clearly states that there was no lease?
—Myca
I looked around for the text of the original law, or agreement, or lease, or whatever, from 1928, but I didn’t find it. I did, however, find the resolution evicting the Scouts. Here’s some relevant bits that people can read for clues:
Have you ever heard of a “tenancy at will” existing for 80 years?
No.
But so what? There are an infinity of things which I haven’t personally heard about. And there is no inherent limit on a tenancy at will (you’ll have to trust me on this one.)
Jamila,
From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/us/06scouts.html?em&ex=1197262800&en=534f254f49c4457d&ei=5087
Ms. Sobel said the city required that any organization that rented property from it agree to nondiscriminatory language in its lease. The Boy Scouts skirted the requirement by never having had to sign a lease because they were given use of the building by city ordinance in the 1920s.
and:
WHEREAS, Pursuant to the terms of the permission granted to the Boy Scouts, the building and property is to be surrendered to the City within one year after notice of a desire to terminate given by the Commissioners of Fairmount Park, with the approval of the Mayor and City Council
No lease. Just because there is shoddy reporting wrt use of language doesn’t mean there was a lease. Notice that the paraphrase from a government official says that there was no lease. The word “lease” is just the term that the reporter used to describe the arrangement. The reporter and the editor did a crappy job on that. All evidence points to the fact that there was no lease, rather there was an ordinance that granted “terms of permission.” There is and was no lease. At least there is no evidence for the existence of a lease. If you have evidence to the contrary, please provide it. If you don’t have any evidence and it’s just that you can’t personally believe that there was [not] a lease, can you please drop it now?
The quote just above the preceding paragraph indicates that the city is following the terms of those terms of permission in terminating the arrangement with the BSA. So can we all just drop the whole “raw deal to the BSA” stuff, too? Unless, of course, you have evidence that indicates that the city is illegitimately terminating the arrangement.
Probably my favorite part of that whole resolution was the paragraph where they said:
Oh, so then according to the terms of the original ordinance, the building became property of the city immediately upon being built? Gosh, I guess that invalidates the entire argument that the city owes the BSA something, doesn’t it? Shocking.
—Myca
Jake Squid:
Yeah. This reminded me of what Mythago said wayyyy back at comment #37, and it’s something my granddad and father, both lawyers, used to say as well:
Right now, Jamila, you have neither facts nor law. Please offer some.
—Myca
I keep quoting the article but I don’t know why you seem hell bent on ignoring it.
The article says the following: “On May 31, the City Council voted 16-to-1 to authorize ending the lease,….”
I don’t understand how I can be any clearer.
Wait a minute. That paragraph does not necessarily mean that there was no lease, only that the BSA never had to sign a lease.
I never attacked the city to begin with.
My point is that all of us here have access to the exact same article that clearly states a city ordinance gave the BSA usage of the land and that the city voted to terminate the “lease”.
And the exact same article states that the use of the land was pursuant to a city ordinance, as you note. A city ordinance is not a lease.
All that aside, ordinance or lease, in what way did the City act improperly? What terms of the alleged lease did it violate?
Jamila Akil said:
I’m curious. What type of lease do you believe there was that all involved did not sign it? And if the BSA did not sign this lease, why is the City obliged to adhere to it? What legal standing would this lease have, if such a thing existed?
What I’m getting at is that I don’t believe that any such lease could exist in any legal sense, as leases, in the legal sense, are contracts. And to be legally binding in any fashion, contracts require all parties bound by or benefitting from the contract or their legal representatives/guardians to sign in order to evidence their willingness to enter into this contract.
So please explain to me what type of contract, specifically a lease-contract, are you implying could have existed? Because, at this point, without any evidence provided on your part to support your claims other than a journalist’s colloquial misuse of the word “lease”, I think you’re just making stuff up to continue an argument that you have already lost.
… I think you’re just making stuff up to continue an argument that you have already lost.
I love this aspect of internet interactions. Welcome to the non-FTF world, where one never has to admit to being wrong.
MisterMephisto Writes:
As I said before, I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know the names of every variety of lease that can exist under the law and the terms of agreement that occur under each variety of lease. According to this link I found: “Lease” means any oral or written agreement, express or implied, creating a landlord-tenant relationship. It includes subleases.
I think there was the kind of lease that is created by a city ordinance which does not require the rentor to sign anything. Eighty years ago when the BSA first built, moved into, and began paying rent on the building many of the laws that now exist covering rental agreements might not have ( most likely didn’t) even exist.
All leases don’t require a signature; they don’t today and they didn’t back in the 1920’s either. Whether a lease is signed or not, as Sailorman has already pointed out, there can be a such thing as a tenancy-at-will where the renter pays rent and the landlord accepts the rent; this tenancy-at-will is usually on a month to month basis but can go as long as both parties agree on it without there being any signatures on a piece of paper. A landlord-in this case the City-has obligations under a tenancy-at-will just like any other landlord and the law will require the City to abide by those laws.
Three years ago, the City declared their intentions to terminate the tenancy-at-will (or whatever type of lease agreement they had going on with the BSA) when they gave the BSA time to either change their policy of discrimination against gays or risk having the lease not renewed.
I disagree but at this point I doubt I’ll convince you, as you certainly won’t convince me.
As has already been stated, all contracts do not require a signature on a piece of paper.
mythago Writes:
The City might not have acted improperly, if the BSA decides to sue then the courts will determine who was in the wrong and what price that party will have to pay.
Because there don’t appear to have ever been any written decisions made about what was going to be done when the BSA no longer wanted to pay the rent or the City stopped accepting it, either the BSA could be out of luck or they could be entitled to monetary remuneration from the City for the cost of the building and its upkeep over the years.
As I said before, I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know the names of every variety of lease that can exist under the law and the terms of agreement that occur under each variety of lease.
That’s fine, because it’s irrelevant to the question: What were the terms of this lease? What terms of this lease did the City violate? If you don’t know the answers to those questions, then there’s no point in claiming here that the City did or did not fulfill its side of the bargain.
mythago Writes:
At this point all we know is that the BSA agreed to build a building and pay $1 rent per year in exchange. The City council agreed to this. There don’t appear to have been any clearly spelled out terms within the ordinance governing what would happen when either side wanted to break the agreement.
I never claimed that the City did or not fulfill it’s side of the bargain and you would know that if you had done more than give my posts a cursory read.
As I have said for the umpteenth time, if the BSA takes this to court then a judge is going to decide what terms were broken.
No, at this point we know that:
–in 1928, the BSA received permission from the city to build the building, with the understanding that once it was built, it belonged to the city–and they built it when they understood, or should have understood, what the grant of permission said;
–the BSA’s discriminatory policies cannot legally continue to be subsidized by the city, and letting them continue to use the building for free or nearly free, instead of at fair rent prices, counts as subsidization;
–the city has to give the BSA one year’s notice of eviction, and after that year is up, the building has to be surrendered to the city (which means there was an exit clause on their agreement; “we get one year’s notice, you get the building back”);
–the city has done this, which means it’s fulfilled all of its legal obligations.
[Summary of the above-linked resolution of the city terminating the arrangement with the local BSA council whereby the latter gets to occupy the building of the former.]
As far as I can tell, the city could, according to the terms of the agreement, terminate the agreement with the BSA for any reason whatsoever. They don’t have to give them a chance to continue using the building while paying fair rent; they don’t have to give them a chance to simply end the discrimination and continue using it. Just like any other arrangement which explains what the rules for termination are, all they have to do is follow those rules–which they have done.
The only thing the city has ever owed the BSA is one year’s notice, which has been given. If the BSA wanted compensation for building the building, they should’ve hammered that out before accepting the “it’s yours once it’s built” agreement. You can’t say “Oh, I’m doing this without thinking of the cost to myself at all, you don’t owe me anything!” and then later complain about not having your costs covered.
The city has been trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient to the law, clean, and brave. Maybe if the Scouts had been more thrifty they could obey the law more cheerfully? Why weren’t they prepared? Not very mentally awake, if you ask this former Girl Scout.
Jamila,
what COULD convince you? I’m asking seriously, because this isn’t about “belief”, it’s about a legal question that can be answered. And I”m not trying to be insulting, but you seem to be exhibiting the classic “a little information is dangerous” attitude: you are talking about laws, and trying to make analyses based on general legal issues, but you’re simply not using the laws correctly, or citing them right.
I see nothing wrong with using links, but there’s a reason that people spend a long time studying law, and property law in particular. You have to remember that there are the general rules, and there are the specific ones. SPECIFIC RULES “WIN” (usually) over general ones. You’re talking about general rules (e.g. your comments about ‘contracts’ and ‘agreements’) while many of us are referencing specific ones.
For example, you said
So what? It is IRRELEVANT whether “a” contract can be formed without “a” signature. As they say, that’s what you learn in your first year of law school: technically and generally correct, factually incorrect (never trust a first year law student.) What is relevant is whether THIS arrangement, taking into consideration the particular facts of THIS case, and all the other laws that apply to THIS situation, from the statute of frauds to municipal statutes to Philadelphia caselaw, meet the criteria for legal action against the city, which action could prevent the city from asking them to leave.
Do you see what I mean? Generalities don’t work.
Incidentally, you referenced me when talking about a tenancy at will, and you said
Yes, there are laws about a tenancy at will. Do you know what they are? I suspect you don’t, because you appear to be suggesting they’re in support of your position. The laws for commercial TIW basically amount to this: The landlord can put the tenant out at any time, with minimal notice (usually one month, if rent is paid monthly) and the tenant can do shit-all to stop it.
And, incidentally,
If you won’t understand, and can’t be convinced, why the %^$@!# are you still posting on the thread?
Gwen:
LOL!
It’s not that I’m hell-bent on ignoring the article, so much as that I think that the actual legal documents quoted take precedence over a one-word reference in a newspaper story.
Why are you hell-bent on ignoring them?
Or the city could be entitled to monetary remuneration from the BSA for 80 years of fair market-rate rent, right Jamila? That would be fair, wouldn’t it?
—Myca
Myca Writes:
You mean the one legal document that Ampersand pointed us all to explaining exactly what the city council did?
I’m not ignoring it; the document shed no new light on whether or not what the BSA had with the city was a lease or not–which was the original thrust of my argument.
No, it wouldn’t, because the city agreed to rent the building for $1 to the BSA in return for the BSA placing the building there and handing the ownership rights of the building over to the city in the first place. It was the city that determined it no longer wanted to rent to the BSA, not the other way around.
Sailorman Writes:
At this point, nothing. Down the line when and if this all gets taken to court and a judge declares that there was no lease agreement and the BSA is SOL then I’ll just have to take the courts word for it.
I’ll take your word for it.
There were no specific rules/laws/regulations cited that pertained to this case. You admitted that you have never heard of a tenancy-at-will existing for 80 years; you suggested that maybe-possibly-kinda there coulda been a short term lease, but then again, you can’t say for sure. Everything you have said has been kinda iffy.
What specific laws/rules/regulations have you or anyone else on this thread cited that pertained to city ordinances created yesterday, let alone 80 years ago?
What section of any legal code did you cite when speaking of this particular case and how it relates to the creation or non-creation of a lease by a city ordinance?
It is not IRRELEVANT at all when someone is suggesting to me that a contract couldn’t have existed because there was no signature.
DUH!
You think I have been asking about leases and contracts and for someone to look up the city ordinance for my own good health?
No, I don’t.
Do I need to know what they are to suggest that the City will have to follow them like any other entity would?
The longer I’ve posted on this thread the less I think that any of you actually know what my position is. So let me clearly state it for you now: The City and the BSA had a rental agreement of some type ( a tenancy-at-will, a short term lease, I don’t know) that was created by the first City ordinance almost 80 years ago; the city may have violated the terms of that lease by terminating the $1 a year rental specified in the first ordinance; a court will determine whether or not there was any violation and what, if anything, the BSA is owed.
I do understand, you’ve tried to convince me but failed, and if this is the last post on this thread that you will make addressing me then I’ll happily stop posting until there is some update on this case.
But this is false. It’s known to be false. If it were true, that the city somehow had no right to terminate the rental arrangement with the BSA council (no matter what laws were passed, no matter how illegal it became to subsidize the council because of its discriminatory practices), there wouldn’t have been the “one year notice” rule. (That would be the “we’re giving the BSA council one year’s notice of eviction as per the agreement” bit in that ordnance you’ve read.) There was; therefore there were rules set up for a unilateral termination of the agreement by the city; therefore such termination is, obviously, not blanket-ly outlawed by the original agreement.
This is also false. The BSA agreed to build the building at its own expense. The BSA also agreed that it would be the city’s once it was built. It’s in the original grant of permission to build the building; if the BSA was too stupid to read it before building, that’s their problem, not the city’s. The BSA was being Helpful, and now it would be pretty disingenuous of them to say, “We were doing it without thought to cost for ourselves! Aren’t we great? Oh, by the way, we expect you to compensate us for all our work.”
Aaaand…
…this is also false. The city determined that it could not legally continue to subsidize a discriminatory organization by, essentially, giving it $199,999 a year. Let me repeat that: it could not legally continue this agreement. Luckily, the agreement had rules for termination by the city, so the city didn’t also have to break the original agreement in order to obey the law.
The BSA, on the other hand, are the ones who decided that it didn’t want the council to rent the building from the city any longer, either by paying fair market rent prices or by stopping its discriminatory practices (and the city was, it sounds like, rather eager to continue subsidizing the BSA council to the tune of an annual $199,999, and would do so if their hands weren’t tied by the BSA’s idiocy w/r/t the unclean gays). This is the BSA’s fault, not the city’s.
So here’s the history, if I understand it all correctly:
1. The BSA got a grant of permission from the city to build a building for it, with the understanding that the building belonged to the city and was on city property and there’d be no compensation except for a warm fuzzy feeling inside. The BSA built said building.
1. The BSA started renting the property for $1 a year.
(I’m not sure which of these came first, but they weren’t tied together anywhere outside of, perhaps, the BSA’s collective mind. Nothing the city can do about BSA delusions.)
2. The BSA council made the building its headquarters.
3. Either the city decided it couldn’t subsidize organizations that discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation first, or the BSA decided it wanted to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation regardless of the loss in government subsidies first–and then the other one happened.
4. The city realized it couldn’t subsidize the BSA by continuing to rent the city’s building to the BSA for less than fair-market rent.
5. The city attempted to get in contact with the BSA to let them know that they were going to terminate the rent agreement, as per the terms of that agreement.
6. The BSA didn’t respond.
7. The city passed the resolution terminating the agreement in one year unless the BSA cut the discrimination crap out, or agreed to actually pay the rent the building (which still belonged to the city, recall) required.
I don’t see what more the city could or should possibly do to make the BSA happier about all this. The city has acted sensibly in this, and in accordance with the law and the agreement with the BSA. The BSA is the one that built the building without guaranteeing that it’d get recompense for it 80 years down the road if it stopped getting charged a dollar in rent–that’s their problem. The BSA is the one that decided to keep on being discriminatory, making it impossible for the city to subsidize it. The BSA is the one that decided it didn’t want to pay fair market rent, all the while crying about how many poor children would be hurt by it if they did. (Yeah, I don’t think they can blame their idiocy on the city here.) What on Earth could the city have done to keep the BSA from whining about how the city is picking on it by not honoring imaginary contracts and agreements the BSA dreamed up without ever putting on paper, not falling all over its feet to sing the praises of the council for building the building for free 80 years ago (like it agreed), not buying the city’s own building from the BSA, hurting all these poor heterosexual Boy Scouts by doing what the law required?
Since this one seems pretty much beaten to death, and we’re well over the 100-comment threshold, I’m going to hijack the thread and see if anyone notices.
RonF in comment 94:
Interesting and infuriating (and thanks for noticing, albeit belatedly). In the “less likely to vote for” surveys I’ve seen, depending somewhat on the wording, homosexual usually checks in at around 35-40 percent, but atheist gets a clear majority and by far the top number — I think it was 63 percent in the last one I saw. A pollster/pundit was quoted to the effect that “Americans want their leaders to have a moral framework; we want them to believe in something higher than themselves.”
Now, I want to know: what in blue blazes gives people the idea that an atheist has no moral framework??? Apparently a lot of religious people (including, but not limited to, the BSA national leadership) think that if you don’t have the threat of hell keeping you in line, you can delight in breaking all ten commandments every day and twice on Sundays. They don’t seem to realize that humans are hard-wired for empathy and that any normal four-year-old can understand the Golden Rule, usually expressed as “you like it when people share their toys with you, so you should share too” or the converse “how would you feel if someone did that to you?” Granted, I live in sinful Massachusetts, but while I’ve heard just about every parent I know use some variation of the above, I’ve never heard any parent or teacher or Girl Scout leader try to inculcate good behavior by saying, “God will be mad if you do that.”
As for believing in something higher than oneself, besides the Golden Rule, how about the rule of law, or the Constitution (“how would you feel if someone promised to uphold the Constitution and then turned around and trashed it?”), or reality?
Thank you. I feel better now. (It occurs to me that since my daughter belongs to a cooperative troop and I get to run one meeting a year, I am officially a Girl Scout leader. I’m also a semi-pagan agnostic. Be very afraid.)
Well, it’s not my thread. But I’ll be glad to respond.
I haven’t heard anyone say that an atheist has no moral framework. I’ve never seen it in any BSA publication. For that matter, I haven’t heard anyone else say it either.
And BTW, a requirement of their member organizations’ individual members to hold religious belief is a central principle of both the WOSM (of which the BSA is a member) and the WAGGGS (of which the GSUSA is a member). That pretty much encompasses about 98% of all Scouting movements in the world.
BTW, I’ve never heard a Boy Scout/Cub Scout/Venture leader say that to a kid either. From my viewpoint, anyway, they’d be out of line if they did.
Obviously, atheists can have moral frameworks. There are probably some stark fundies who disagree, but by and large I think there’s a consensus on this – even among the people (like me) who wouldn’t be likely to vote for an atheist.
It’s worth pointing out that those who claim adherence to an orthodox established faith do have something that atheists don’t – a commonly-understood framework that many, many other people already know about and to which the candidate’s behavior can be compared. Frank the atheist may well be the most decent person around – but he’s probably not able to point to a book that a billion people already own, or a four-thousand-year-old religious/ethical tradition that a billion people already understand, and say “the fundamentals of my beliefs are found here”.
I note that the pollster/pundit being semi-quoted wasn’t saying why S/HE wouldn’t vote for an atheist – they were instead trying to explain the behavior of others. It might be simpler to just ask people who actually wouldn’t vote for an atheist, why not. I don’t think the answer would very commonly be “because atheists have no morals” – as noted, not that many people think that.
For me, the answer would be that the existence or nonexistence of God is a huge component of a person’s view of the world, and I am uncomfortable granting political authority to people whose vision of the world is radically different than my own. I don’t think that’s a controversial position; I believe, in fact, that it is the default for most of us. Sometimes there’s no, or little, option – if you’re a flat-earther, you’re pretty much out of luck finding a candidate who endorses your view. Atheists are thicker on the ground, but not that much thicker.
In a world where it was 90% atheists and 10% believers, it’d be the other way around. I somehow doubt the atheists would be staying up at night worrying about how it’s impossible for a fundamentalist Christian to get political power.
Well; this is waking back up. The Cradle of Liberty Council is suing the City of Philadelphia to block their May 31st eviction.
Apparently they’re basing the suit on First Amendment grounds. From the story:
Hah! We’re not going down quietly. I wonder how this lawsuit is being funded, on both sides.
I find it mystifying how many people are unable to understand that ‘the right to act like a bigot’ ≠ ‘the right to suffer no consequences for acting like a bigot.’
Yeah, apparently some people just can’t accept the perfectly predictable consequences of their actions.
—Myca
Like insisting on sitting in whatever seat on a bus they choose to regardless of their skin color? The result of that was perfectly predictable. The long-term consequences were rather different, though.
Yes, that’s right, Ron.
The Boy Scouts are totally like Rosa Parks here. Fight the power.
Christ, do you even understand how offensive and ignorant that is?
So, Ron, in your view:
* The “right” to receive government hand-outs while discriminating about gays
(equals)
* The right to be treated equally regardless of race.
I have to agree with Myca; that seems ridiculous.
Tell me, if the government were giving hand-outs to an organization that discriminated against Jews or Blacks or Christians, would you still feel the First Amendment would require the government to continue giving hand-outs forever?
Ron’s not saying that the Scouts are Rosa Parks, he’s saying that “the results of this action is predictable” isn’t a valid criticism.
How did you get the != to appear like that?
Since what I was referring to was, “if you keep discriminating against gay people, the government will no longer give you a sweetheart handout,” it seems like a pretty valid criticism.
They knew the consequences of continuing to commit themselves to bigotry, committed themselves to bigotry anyway, and threw a tantrum afterwards.
I would suggest that the most valid comparison is not in fact “Rosa Parks”, but rather “most toddlers”:
Me: “Stop hitting him, or you’ll go in a time out.”
Toddler: *HIT*
Me: “Okay, time for a time out.”
Toddler: “ButitsnofairyousaidIcouldstayupandplaywaaaaahhhhhhh!”
I googled “does not equal” and cut and pasted. I can never figure out special characters, but now the internet is my keyboard.
—Myca
Well, it’s not a perfect analogy. Rosa Parks knew quite well that her then-novel actions of insisting on her 14th Amendment rights had good odds of ending up with her being hauled off to jail or paying a fine. IIRC, the long-term effects of advancing the civil rights agenda was not something she had on her mind at the time, but it was a great thing that it happened.
The BSA takes the view that it’s standing up for it’s First Amendment rights. Of course, in this case it’s actions weren’t novel, it was proceeding as it had for the last 90 years in actions that the Supremes have ruled are entirely legal – it was the City of Philadelphia that changed their stance. The fact that this was predictable is not so clear; after all, it’s a matter of public record that the City had granted the lease in perpetuity. It was not necessarily predictable that it would go back on it’s word.
In any case, we’ll see if the courts agree that their 1st Amendment rights override the City of Philadelphia’s actions. I’m sure that whoever loses this case will appeal at each step, so this will at some point – probably in a couple of years – end up being decided by the Supremes.
As far as it being discrimination – sure it is. But the word discrimination takes in both good and bad things. The BSA discriminates against pedophiles as well; I’m sure you agree that that’s a good thing, as is the fact that they don’t discriminate on the basis of race. You don’t agree that discrimination against homosexuals who are open about their sexuality is reasonable and call it bigotry. Others disagree. I don’t expect to persuade you to change your viewpoint.
I’m not going to repeat the argument about this being a handout. Anyone new to this thread can go upthread and read it. Suffice it to say that while those who support the City’s actions in this case call this a handout, the viewpoint of others (including myself) see this as the City unilaterally reneging on a deal.
If the government was actually giving handouts to such organizations, I’d oppose it. If, OTOH, they had made a deal with such an organization receiving value in kind it would be desirable but non-trivial to abrogate it. My instinct would be to set up a deal to return to the organization the property that had been handed over so as to wash my hands of them. After all, it wouldn’t be moral to benefit from a deal with such an organization.
How legal is it for a private organization to discriminate on the basis of race? Or religion?
Ron:
It doesn’t appear to be true that the lease was granted in perpetuity — although I can see why the boy scouts want to spread that false claim. From comment #165:
From that, it seems likely that the terms of the original agreement made it possible for the City to choose to evict the Scouts with a year’s notice, at the city’s discretion. That’s what the Scouts seemingly agreed to, but they’re not willing to abide by that agreement now.
It’s perfectly legal for a private organization to discriminate on the basis of race or religion, within certain limitations. (A supermarket can’t decide not to sell to customers, or hire employees, based on race, for instance; however, the KKK is perfectly within its legal rights to refuse to accept non-white members.) However, just because the Boy Scouts aren’t breaking the law doesn’t mean they’re entitled to public handouts forever. I’m not breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean that the city owes me a residence.
It’s not necessarily the case that the Supremes will hear this case; the question isn’t if it gets appealed, but if the Supremes choose to hear the appeal.
If you’re not interested in defending your view, no one’s making you post on this thread.
It’s entirely unacceptable for you to use pedophilia as an analogy for homosexuality on “Alas,” Ron. Don’t defend the comparison, and don’t do it again on my blog; next time I delete your post. (There’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t have used some other crime for your comparison: For instance, no one would object to the BSA refusing to hire convicted thieves, or drunk drivers, or… But instead, you chose to use the slander that’s been used against gays for decades. Classy.)
Discrimination against gays is unreasonable because the state of being gay does not harm anyone (unlike, say, drunk driving). Being gay is thus a lot more like being a cartoonist than it is like being a drunk driver.
Where it’s unlike being a cartoonist, of course, is the long (and ongoing) history of discrimination and abuse against gays. If you discriminate against cartoonists, that’s just a bizarre quirk; when you discriminate against a commonly discriminated against, oppressed class of people, you’re contributing to a system that does enormous, real harm to innocent people.
By perpetuating this bigotry, the Boy Scouts are sending a message that they approve of bigotry, hatred, discrimination and abuse, and wish it t0 continue. They’re also teaching the boys they work with that being a hateful, irrational bigot is acceptable behavior.
It’s entirely unacceptable for you to use pedophilia as an analogy for homosexuality on “Alas,” Ron.
Ah, shit. The idea that one follows from another was not what I had intended. I simply put down the first crime that came to mind, and when I think of crime and kids together that’s what I came up with. It’s a major worry of mine, especially this time of year when we get the new Scouts into the Troop, along with new parents. Maybe I watch too much “Law and Order SVU”. I had thought the “as well” indicated a separation there. I assure you that I do not presume or present that gays are pedophiles or that pedophilia is a form of homosexuality.
Thanks for the clarification, Ron. It’s appreciated.
What Mandolin said. :-)