Last week the Supreme Court decided that any private organization (namely the Boy Scouts of America [BSA]) has the right to discriminate based on sexual orientation.

Okay, so the Scouts are a private organization; the reasoning and intent are clear enough. Our highest court has ruled that private organizations may discriminate. It’s illegal to discharge a leader because of his skin color, but if he prefers men to women in the most private aspect of his life, he’s out.

Furthermore, how do the Scouts plan to determine which of their leaders is gay, anyway? Maybe they should put it in the Boy Scout Laws: I promise to do my duty, to God and my country, to help other people at all times, to obey the Boy Scout Laws, and to sleep only with women. Then it’s up to the gay scout to decide whether he should stay and be hypocritical or quietly bow out of an organization that has offered him camaraderie and a moral, ethical base from long before the time he entered adolescence and determined what his sexual orientation was.

Consider the young man who started off with the Scouts as a Tiger Cub when he was six years old. Now, years later, he thinks he might be gay, but has always hoped to stay in scouting and eventually become an Eagle Scout. He’s confronted with a moral dilemma much like that of his counterpart in the armed forces: tell or don’t tell. But he’s only 13. Ethically, should he retire his kerchief and badges when he realizes he doesn’t "fit in"? If he does, who substitutes for the leaders he has admired, who have modeled good adult behavior to him? And what are the Boy Scouts of America telling him about himself? That he’s immoral, even before he’s ever had one sexual experience? That he’s automatically perverted, whereas heterosexuals are only so regarded after convicted of a crime?

Coming out is hard enough already. The Scouts and the Supreme Court have just made it even harder for "mainstream" individuals to be honest about their sexual orientation — to live open and honestly. And there’s the irony. Isn’t that what the Boy Scouts teach?

That brings me to my other topic, the one with the local twist. On Sunday, June 25, Ralph Nader accepted the nomination to run for President as a candidate of the Green Party. The Greens are a fairly new party in the U.S. (though not in Germany, their country of origin — which having just visited I can attest is greener than most, partly due to their intense commitment to recycling and conservation) whose public policy includes improvements in the areas of the environment, workplace safety, health care, and social justice. But the Greens, without the large coffers of the Democratic and Republican Parties, are having a hard time getting Nader’s name on the ballot nationwide. For example, according to Chris Fegley of the Dauphin County Greens, in Pennsylvania alone, petitioners need to collect 40,000 signatures in order to achieve this goal.

Last weekend, representatives of the Dauphin County Green Party took some petitions down to the American Music Festival in Riverfront Park and claimed a street corner or two in an attempt to further this cause. Mike Fiorentino, Paxton Township resident and another member of the Dauphin Co. Greens, told MODE Weekly that it wasn’t long before someone from the Office of Parks and Recreation came along and asked the Greens to disperse. Now, this employee was simply doing her job. The City of Harrisburg Parks and Recreation office had the park for the weekend and any group who wished to have a booth could have applied for a permit and paid the fee to rent the space (as did many vendors). But this Nader thing came up relatively late, and the application procedure takes 10 days. Furthermore, the Fiorentino and Fegley didn’t know they needed a permit. Thinking they were exercising their First Amendment Rights, they and a few others had appeared at the Festival at the spur of the moment just to gather some of the signatures they needed.

"We don’t have a machine like the big parties," Fiorentino said. Being law-abiding, they took their efforts off city property.

I guess with those kinds of rules, the patriots in 1776 should have taken their complaints somewhere off the Boston Common.

"It’s ironic," said Fiorentino, "that on Independence Day we couldn’t exercise our First Amendment Rights in Harrisburg."

Freedom. It’s worth protecting, and the fight starts right in your own town.

Read on.