The lawsuit, filed recently in San Diego Superior Court by attorney Dean Broyles, contends that the twice weekly, 30-minute classes are inherently religious and thus violate the separation between church and state.

The plaintiffs, Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock, whose children are students in the Encinitas Union School District, are seeking no monetary damages, but merely for the program to be suspended.

The lawsuit notes Harvard-educated religious studies professor Candy Gunter Brown’s findings that the school’s yoga program is religious in nature, having its roots in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist beliefs.

In a report from Fox News, Broyles stated that the yoga program goes too far.

“EUSD’s Ashtanga yoga program represents a serious breach of the public trust,” Broyles said. “Compliance with the clear requirements of law is not optional or discretionary. This is frankly the clearest case of the state trampling on the religious freedom rights of citizens that I have personally witnessed in my 18 years of practice as a constitutional attorney.”

According to Broyles, his clients took legal action after the district refused to take their complaints into account.

“Yoga Uncoiled – From East to West” (DVD): A look into the practice of yoga in the church”

District Superintendent Timothy Baird said he supported the integration of yoga into the school’s curriculum, noting he had not seen the lawsuit and couldn’t directly comment on it.

“We’re not teaching religion,” he said to Fox. “We teach a very mainstream physical fitness program that happens to incorporate yoga into it. It’s part of our overall wellness program. The vast majority of students and parents support it.”

The yoga lessons are funded by a $533,000 three-year grant to the district from the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes Asthanga yoga. The school district is believed to be the first in the country with full-time yoga instructors in all of its schools.

While the lawsuit only names the Sedlock family, Broyles suggested that numerous other families across the school district feel the same way.

According to Broyles, children who have opted out of the program have been bullied. He also noted that students who opt out are missing out on 60 of the 100 weekly minutes of physical activity required by the state, since they usually sit and read during yoga instruction.

Teaching yoga in public schools has become more prevalent in recent years. From rural West Virginia to urban schools in Brooklyn, instructors are appearing on school campuses. But most are after-school programs and not part of the day-to-day curriculum.

However, the New York Times just weeks ago reported that yoga can be dangerous for men, because they proportionally report more frequent injuries, strokes, fractures and dead nerves than women receive from the activity.

And the Daily Mail documented several years ago that the chief exorcist for the Vatican condemned yoga.

Don Gabriele Amorth said in the report, “Practicing yoga brings evil as does reading Harry Potter. They may both seem innocuous, but they both deal with magic and that leads to evil.

“Yoga is the devil’s work,” he said. “You think you are doing it for stretching your mind and body, but it leads to Hinduism. All these oriental religions are based on the false belief of reincarnation.”

He continued, “Satan is always hidden and the thing he desires more than anything is for people to believe he does not exist. He studies each and every one of us and our tendencies towards good and evil and then he tempts us.”

The report also cited Giorgio Furlan, who runs the Yoga Academy in Rome, saying, “There are some paths of yoga which do lead toward Hinduism but other paths are more philosophical but there is no direct link with religion and certainly no link with satanism.”

Concerned individuals may contact the Encinitas Union School District by calling (760)944-4300 or by emailing comments and concerns.

The board admits that staff at Cap-Jeunesse high school in Saint-Jerome, QC, “lacked judgment” for asking 28 Grade 10 students to remove their clothes when a phone went missing last week.

The students were ordered to put their phones on a teacher’s desk to prevent cheating during a math exam but one phone was unaccounted for, prompting teachers to order the strip search.

Under the state attorney’s deal, Hunt would have been labeled a sex offender and placed on two years’ house arrest, according to NBC affiliate WPTV.

Hunt will appear in court June 20, and could face 15 years in prison if convicted.

Members of the Student Council decided on day’s theme. It called for boys to dress like girls and girls to dress like boys.

“I was speechless actually, and I asked a few of the neighbors because I thought I was overreacting, stuff like that, and everybody was speechless,” said one mother, who asked not to be identified.

The case involves Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, an 18-year-old in Sebastian, Florida, who was arrested in February after admitting that she had a lesbian affair with a 14-year high-school freshman. It is a felony in Florida to have sex with 14-year-olds. Hunt was expelled from Sebastian High School — where she and the younger girl had sex in a restroom stall — and charged with two counts of “felony lewd and lascivious battery on a child.” The charges could put Hunt in prison for up to 15 years. Prosecutors have offered Hunt a plea bargain that would spare her jail time, but her supporters have organized an online crusade to have her let off scot-free — in effect, nullifying Florida’s law, which sets the age of consent at 16.

The letter from the Department of Education trashed the standard of whether a “reasonable person” would consider actions harassing, and explained that any comment, action, insinuation or implication would be harassment if it was unwanted.

The letter warned that the school’s sexual harassment policy “improperly suggests that the conduct does not constitute sexual harassment unless it is objectively offensive.”

For example, the university explains – incorrectly according to Washington – that “whether conduct is sufficiently offensive to constitute sexual harassment is determined from the perspective of an objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation.”

Not good, said the letter signed by Anurima Bhargava, chief of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Educational Opportunities Section, and Gary Jackson, a region chief for the U.S. Department of Education.

“Whether conduct is objectively offensive is a factor used to determine if a hostile environment has been created, but it is not the standard to determine whether conduct was ‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’ and therefore constitutes ‘sexual harassment,’” the letter said.

Read the full letter.

It was addressed to University of Montana President Royce Engstrom and its lawyer, Lucy France. The startling new standard came in the 31-page document that was a “resolution” of an investigation into the sexual harassment climate at the school and its “compliance review” of officials’ actions.

“Sexual harassment is unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature. When sexual harassment is sufficiently severe or pervasive to deny or limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program based on sex, it creates a hostile environment,” the federal officials warned the state.

Hans Bader at the Chronicle of Higher Education noted the position adopted by the Education Department is “radical.”

“The department criticized the university for defining sexual harassment based on previous Supreme Court rulings, including a 1993 decision that said conduct is not harassment if it does not offend a ‘reasonable person,’ and a 1999 ruling in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education that emphasized that conduct must be ‘severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive’ to constitute illegal sexual harassment under Title IX,” he wrote.

Nonsense, suggested the federal letter. What must be enforced is a standard that classifies as sexual harassment “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.” And that includes “verbal” conduct.

The report noted that under those conditions, a professor who references issues such as HIV transmission would be guilty of sexual harassment if any one of his students was uncomfortable.

The letter explains that while the narrower definition might be usable if there is a lawsuit, for the enforcement the schools must use, the broader and much more vague definitions are required.

Bader, a lawyer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, previously worked in the Office for Civil Rights in the Education Department, and he said the department in 2003 reached the opposite conclusion. He reported that the standard then was that harassment must be “something beyond the mere expression of views … that some person finds offensive.”

It then referenced the perspective of that “reasonable person.”

Bader warned of the complications of the new Obama administration ban on all unwelcome speech. Every sex-education class would fall under that ban if even one squeamish student objects, he noted.

“Defining any romantic overture as harassment merely because it turns out to be unwelcome – even if it only occurred once, and was not repeated after its unwelcomeness became known – has dire implications for dating,” he wrote. “Since no one is a mind reader, the only way to avoid ever making an ‘unwelcome advance’ is to never ask anyone out on a date.”

Further, the instruction letter violates the due process requirements of the Constitution by insisting that punishment may be required before the hearing process regarding allegations of sexual harassment may be completed.

The impact of a letter is to “cast a dark could over academic freedom and the ability to debate important issues about sexual morality, norms, and roles that may offend some listeners,” he concluded.

The report was generated because the school was concerned after two sex assaults were reported and officials had asked a retired judge to make recommendations. Washington stepped in immediately to do a concurrent evaluation.

It concluded that the university wasn’t adequately addressing “sexual harassment” that was “verbal” or “nonverbal” or “unwelcome” sexual advances.

Washington also recently came under fire for determining that on-campus sex assault cases would not be decided, as in courts, by evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

In fact, Washington requires colleges to use a preponderance of evidence standard, which simply means someone would think there is more evidence something did happen than not.

On April 4, 2011, the Education Department issued a directive on campus sexual assault that states, “A school’s grievance procedures must use the preponderance of the evidence standard to resolve complaints of sex discrimination.”

And by “sex discrimination,” they also mean rape. The direction on grievance procedures is listed under a heading titled: “What are a school’s obligations under Title IX regarding sexual violence?”

College campus courts using the preponderance of evidence standard of evidence to weigh sexual assault cases have many onlookers outraged.

The group Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, or SAVE, believes the department policy is unconstitutional. SAVE issued a statement declaring the preponderance of evidence standard is “stripping the accused of the presumption of innocence and allowing students to be expelled without the benefit of legal counsel.”

SAVE has published a list of 13 organizations that have issued letters calling on the department to rescind its sexual assault directive, including the American Association of University Professors, the American Council for Trustees and Alumni, the National Association for Scholars, Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, eight civil rights scholars, Accuracy in Media, the Heartland Institute, the Alliance Defending Freedom and Feminists for Free Expression.

A year ago, WND reported a case of severe injustice caused by the department’s preponderance of evidence policy.

Student Caleb Warner was found guilty of sexual assault by a campus court at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks in 2010 despite the facts established at the time by city police.

Officers not only refused to charge him, but also alleged his accuser made a false report. Police issued a warrant for her arrest.

It took 18 months – during which Warner not only was banned from the UND campus, but also from all college campuses in the state – for the university to agree to reconsider the conviction and clear his record.

The Foundation For Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, said, “Nobody should be surprised that [Warner] does not want to return to UND.”

“The university showed less than zero concern for disrupting his life and career and branding him a criminal based on an extremely low standard of evidence, and has shown zero inclination to be remorseful about what it has done,” the group said.

WND reported earlier this year that the region that survived a communist regime and emerged from war and violence into a form of democracy was being torn apart by a social civil war.

It was all over a dead sex researcher who based much of his research on pedophiles – Alfred Kinsey.

Reisman, who was the principal investigator for a Department of Justice research project on child sex abuse, told WND at the time she was working with attorneys in the former Yugoslav republic on a lawsuit against those who falsely accused her of being a Holocaust denier, a criminal offense in Croatia, and defamed her by calling her a “walking mockery.”

The genesis of the story is a move by the Croatian government to impose a Kinsey-based sex education program on school children without parental input or alternatives.

As Reisman has documented in her book, “Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences,” Kinsey’s controversial reports 50 years ago on human sexuality “involved illegal sexual experimentation on several hundred young children.”

His survey, she wrote, “was based on a nonrepresentative group of Americans – including hundreds of sex offenders, prostitutes, prison inmates and exhibitionists.”

She told WND one of the authors of the proposed sex curriculum in Croatia, Aleksandar Stulhofer, is linked to Kinsey’s research and the ongoing work of an institute that bears Kinsey’s name.

Now reports from Croatia confirm that its top court suspended the use of those sex education lessons – ruling that the government refused to consult parents in its effort to introduce the explicit lessons.

Judge Mato Arlovic noted, “Enabling parents to take part in the preparation of a curriculum is a country’s constitutional obligation.”

Several groups from within Croatia had protested to the court that the sex education lessons violated the constitution because educators imposed them without parental involvement.

The decision means sex education classes for school students will be suspended.

An estimated 90 percent of the 4.2 million Croatians are Roman Catholics whose church objects to the lessons.

WND reported earlier that according to Project Censored, a respected Croatian journalist working for a state-run network, Karolina Vidovic-Kristo, had a story Dec. 29, 2012, on the government’s sex education program.

Project Censored noted: “The sex-education issue has been a topic of widespread debate in Croatia, in the media and by the people on line in various forums. The program was well researched, professionally produced and of significant interest to the citizens of Croatia.

“The program, as are most Croatians, was critical of the government policy and the foundations on which the [sex education] program is based,” the report said.

Within 24 hours, she was sanctioned by the state-run network HRT/HTV, which suspended her from duties, canceled her show and publicly threatened her with “strong measures.”

Reisman then was invited to Croatia to speak in support of Vidovic-Kristo and underwent what a report from the regional Dnevno.hr website called “the staunch and aggressive, at times shockingly rude and utterly uncivilized opponents of Dr. Reisman’s views.”

The report said: “The pinnacle of such intolerance was when the faculty’s dean [at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb], Nenad Zakosec, came out and aggressively, shouted at Reisman before hundreds of students many of which had shouted insults and barraged bigoted questions/comments): ‘What are you doing here!’”

Croatian blogger Ina Vukic wrote, “It is no wonder that Reisman said later that she had never before in her life been confronted by so many bullies as during this visit to Croatia.”

Reisman told WND that some in the media who were attacking her worked for a local print publication whose parent company also owns a Playboy publishing franchise in Croatia. The publisher is Europa Press Holding, which produces newspapers Jutarnji List and Slobodna Dalmacija in addition to Playboy, according to reports.

While officials, she reported, “said I had no right to say anything that I said,” the people of Croatia responded with overwhelming thankfulness that she was putting into words their concerns about the sex-education demands.

“I couldn’t go anywhere without someone coming up and apologizing for the behavior of these hooligans,” she told WND.

She said she was received by some government officials as well as leaders of both the Jewish and Catholic communities. She said she fears for Croatia, which as a historically conservative country has a low rate of sexually transmitted diseases.

Others made the campaign by some in Croatia for an explicit sex-ed program for children into an international dispute.

British filmmaker Timothy Tate’s horror at the situation has been posted online:

He said he was astonished, as a filmmaker and a journalist, when he found out about Kinsey.

“It’s absolutely crystal clear in his own words, he was using pedophiles to sexually assault children,” he said.

He noted that even today, Kinsey’s claims are the basis for much of sex education around the world.

“Yet here was this appalling record of the sexual assault and I think in some cases you could call it torture of children masquerading as science,” he said.

He said Kinsey should be considered “complicit” in the assaults on children because of his ongoing relationship with the offenders.

He expressed alarm at the punishment for Vidovic-Kristo, noting that if journalists can’t raise issues about which society needs a discussion, there is an absence of freedom.

And he said the issue at hand – Kinsey’s “myth” that children are sexual from birth – is significant.

According to supporters for the Croatian journalist, the government introduced the mandatory sex education just last fall, without any discussion with parents or religious leaders.

The curriculum would include “touching” exercises starting in the third grade. It’s premised on Kinsey’s contention that children are sexual from birth. Pornography is taught in the sixth grade.

Stulhofer, who teaches sexology in Zagreb, was trained at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, and, on his behalf, “Reisman was viciously smeared by the Croatian press,” his critics said.

One article suggested she be deported. She was accused of trivializing the Holocaust and now has hired attorney Zvonimir Hodak to represent her in a legal challenge against the media.

“The fact that an elderly Jewish lady was viciously attacked is unprecedented for Croatia’s young democracy,” wrote one of Reisman’s supporters. “Croatia is scheduled to join the E.U. in July 2013. The recent visit of Dr. Reisman has exposed major deficits re fairness in the media, as well as ideological baggage from the Communist time. It would be very useful to get this news out into the international press.”

Just last year, Reisman, said pedophilia advocates are using the same strategy that was successfully employed to make homosexuality a classroom subject for small children in the nation’s public schools.

As WND reported, Reisman attended a symposium held by the “minor-attracted people” advocacy group B4U-ACT to disseminate “accurate information” on the position that pedophilia is just one more alternative sexual orientation.

Judith Reisman (Photo credit: Sherrie Buzby)

“If a foreign country came in and did this to our nation, the nation would be outraged,” Reisman said about the B4U-Act event, also attended by J. Matt Barber, vice president of Liberty Counsel Action.

The speakers urged the removal of pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental defects in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Reisman explained the same strategy was used by homosexual activists in the 1970s when same-sex attractions were removed from the APA’s list of disorders.

Eventually, the legalization of “gay marriage,” the mandatory homosexuality lessons in public schools and the policy of allowing open homosexuality in the U.S. military resulted.

“Dr. John Sadler (University of Texas) argued that diagnostic criteria for mental disorders should not be based on concepts of vice since such concepts are subject to shifting social attitudes and doing so diverts mental-health professions from their role as healers,” the B4U-ACT organization said in a report about its symposium in Baltimore.

Another celebrity was Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins who argued in favor of “acceptance of and compassion for people who are attracted to minors,” the report continued.

The report pointedly referred to “minor-attracted people” in reference to pedophiles and explained that the concerns can be resolved with “accurate information.” Richard Kramer, who represented B4U-ACT at the event, contended listing pedophilia as a disorder stigmatizes the “victims” of the lifestyle choice.

WND also previously reported when a campaign by Reisman, now a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, began taking her seminars on the fallacies of Kinsey to Rome, Ireland and London.

One of her books exposing the agenda of Kinsey’s lifelong campaign recently has been translated into Chinese.

“People in other countries are contacting me, asking me to please come and deliver the truth,” she told WND.

Kinsey’s extreme view of sexuality is typified by a statement posted on the website of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which advocates sex between adults and children.

The statement, from Kinsey’s book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” defends adult-child sex and accuses those who object to it of being responsible for “serious effects” suffered by children:

“When children are constantly warned by parents and teachers against contacts with adults, and when they receive no explanation of the exact nature of the contacts, they are ready to become hysterical as soon as any older person approaches, or stops and speaks to them in the street, or fondles them, or proposes to do something for them, even though the adult may have had no sexual objective in mind. Some of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of the parents, police officers, and other adults who discover that the child has had such a contact, may disturb the child more seriously than the sexual contacts themselves. The current hysteria over sex offenders may very well have serious effects on the ability of many of these children to work out sexual adjustments some years later.”

Reisman has lectured at Princeton, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Pepperdine, Johns Hopkins, the FBI, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Jerusalem, University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University. She has been cited by the London Times, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has appeared on “Entertainment Tonight,” “Larry King Live,” “Donahue,” the”Today” show and “Crossfire.”

She’s been listed in “The World’s Who’s Who of Women.”

WND Managing Editor David Kupelian, shortly after publication of “The Marketing of Evil” in 2005, predicted publicly that the next “liberation movement” to assault America would be “the mainstreaming of adult-child sex.”

Now he has noted, “The same godless logic that leads to normalization of homosexual marriage will lead also to the de-stigmatization and decriminalization of pedophilia. Remember, consensuality has replaced morality in today’s legal system, so a young person’s ‘consent’ to have sex will ultimately trump the old-fashioned desire to protect the innocent. Also, since adult-child sex is a ‘cultural preference’ in certain non-Western countries, child-molestation lobbyists are now making the argument that criminalizing adult-child sex amounts to condemning another culture. So that’s where multiculturalism has brought us.”

The new policy maintains the exclusion of adult leaders who are openly homosexual, however.

The BSA said the resolution was approved by 61 percent of the approximately 1,400 Boy Scout leaders from across the nation who voted at the organization’s annual conference in Grapevine, Texas.

In a statement issued after the vote, the BSA said the policy change is effective Jan. 1, 2014, “allowing the transition time needed to communicate and implement this policy to its approximately 116,000 Scouting units.”

The statement said the resolution “reinforces that Scouting is a youth program, and any sexual conduct, whether heterosexual or homosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting.”

Responding to the vote, the Family Research Council “expressed deep disappointment at the Boy Scouts of America.”

“Sadly, the Boy Scouts’ legacy of producing great leaders has become yet another casualty of moral compromise,” said FRC President Tony Perkins. “Unfortunately, Boy Scout delegates capitulated to strong-arm tactics and abandoned the timeless values that have served the organization well for more than 100 years.”

Perkins said the delegates “succumbed to a concerted and manipulative effort by the national BSA leadership despite the BSA’s own survey showing 61 percent of its members in opposition to changing the policy.”

The new policy, devised after an extensive survey of BSA members, is a revision of a proposal issued in January that would have allowed local troops to decide whether or not to accept openly homosexual members and leaders.

The Scouts count more than 2.7 million members and more than 1 million volunteers.

The BSA said in its statement today that the National Executive Committee, which just completed a lengthy review process, has “no plans for further review on this matter.”

“The Boy Scouts of America will not sacrifice its mission, or the youth served by the movement, by allowing the organization to be consumed by a single, divisive, and unresolved societal issue,” the statement said.

The BSA said that while “people have different opinions about this policy, we can all agree that kids are better off when they are in Scouting.”

A coalition of parents, scoutmasters, Eagle Scouts and other scouting leaders opposing the policy change, called OnMyHonor.net, said after the vote that the BSA can no longer use the phrase “timeless values” in good faith.

“It is with great sadness and deep disappointment that we recognize on this day that the most influential youth program in America has turned a tragic corner,” the group said. “The vote today to allow open and avowed homosexuality into Scouting will completely transform it into an unprincipled and risky proposition for parents. It is truly a sad day for Scouting.”

Pascal Tessier, a 16-year-old Boy Scout from Maryland who became one of the faces of opposition to the old policy, said the vote today allows him to earn his Eagle Scout award.

His older brother, Lucien Tessier, launched a petition on Change.org in favor of the resolution.

“Just a few hours ago, I was thinking that today could be my last day as a Boy Scout,” he said. “Obviously, for gay Scouts like me, this vote is life-changing.”

Defenders of the old policy have argued that many scouts who are homosexual have participated in the program without making an issue of their sexuality.

Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute in Sacramento, said the BSA leadership “has cowered to the financial bullying of homosexual activists.”

“The Boy Scouts are an organization that takes in approximately $500 million a year,” she said. “The homosexual activists have successfully worked their ground-game of pressuring donors and bullying the board members of this iconic institution.”

The BSA’s decision to propose a change in policy, as WND reported, coincided with a sudden drop in major corporate funding that began last summer after a “gay”-rights blogger for the Huffington Post published a collaborative report that named the donors and chastised them for violating their own policy of not discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.

Call to prayer

Amid emotional public demonstrations today outside BSA headquarters in Dallas and the nearby convention site, OnMyHonor.net posted a call to prayer today on the organization’s Facebook page.

“Would you join us in a time of solemn prayer for our country and for the future of America’s youth? Please pray that He has mercy on the BSA and all of us,” the post said.

Meanwhile, in an op-ed in USA Today yesterday, BSA President Wayne Perry called on the National Council to approve the resolution.

“The BSA’s executive committee unanimously presented this resolution because it stays true to Scouting’s mission and remains focused on kids,” said Perry. “No matter what your opinion is on this issue, America needs Scouting, and our policies must be based on what is in the best interest of our nation’s children.”

OnMyHonor.Net founder John Stemberger has contended that a change in the membership policy would “gut a major percentage of human capital in the BSA and utterly devastate the program financially, socially and legally.”

He has called the policy change “logically incoherent and morally and ethically inconsistent.”

“Opening the Boy Scouts to boys who openly proclaim being sexually attracted to other boys and/or openly identify themselves as ‘gay’ will inevitably create an increase of boy-on-boy sexual contact,” said Stemberger in an open letter to the voting Scout leaders.

This week, the Alliance Defending Freedom delivered a petition with 18,724 signatures to the BSA urging the organization to adhere to traditional American values. Meanwhile, the homosexual-advocacy group Scouts for Equality said it delivered nearly 300,000 petition signatures asking the BSA to end its ban on homosexual members.

Twenty U.S. House Democrats sent a letter to the BSA urging an end to the ban. The Congress members said excluding homosexual scouts and scout leaders “is counter to BSA’s mission to teach our youth to combat discrimination.”

OnMyHonor.Net’s Stemberger says internal estimates by the BSA project an estimated $44 million of lost annual revenue if the policy is changed.

He points to BSA’s own “Voice of the Scout” surveys that indicate tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of parents, scoutmasters and scouts will leave the program if the proposal is adopted.

A member of the National Council previously told WND a decision to change the policy will prompt many at all levels of the organization to quit.

Homosexual-rights groups have said the proposed policy change doesn’t go far enough, because a scout who is homosexual must quit the organization when he turns 18.

John Eastman, a constitutional scholar who has advised the Boy Scouts against broadening the membership policy, told the Washington Times before the vote he believed that some local councils will break off from the BSA depending on the outcome.

“Quite frankly, I think that if anybody’s going to leave, it ought to be the ones that are seeking to change the organization into something it’s not, rather than those who want to adhere to what it has traditionally always been,” Eastman said. “I’m an Eagle Scout myself, my son’s an Eagle Scout and my grandfather was an Eagle Scout. This hits personal.”

About 70 percent of local Scout troops are supported by churches or other religious groups, most of which teach that homosexual behavior is sinful.

Southern Baptist Church leaders urged the Scouts to maintain the membership policy, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the largest sponsor of Boy Scout troops in the U.S., affirmed the proposal.

The Catholic Church, the third-largest Scout troop sponsor, indicated it wants to work with the BSA even if the policy is changed.

Core values

Last July, after a thorough two-year study, an 11-member committee of professional scout executives and adult volunteers unanimously concluded the policy of not allowing open homosexuals should be maintained.

The BSA executive committee announced that while not all board members “may personally agree with this policy, and may choose a different direction for their own organizations, BSA leadership agrees this is the best policy for the organization and supports it for the BSA.”

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of the Scout organization to exclude homosexuals, because the behavior violated the core values of the private organization.

“I did the teacher thing that we’re probably not supposed to do. I prayed — and I prayed out loud,” she said in an interview with NBC News following the violent storm.

The behind-the-scenes legislative effort came to light Tuesday when The Courant obtained a copy of an email by a top assistant to Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane, Timothy J. Sugrue. Sugrue, an assistant state’s attorney, discussed options considered so far, including blocking release of statements “made by a minor.”

“There is complete agreement regarding photos etc., and audio tapes, although the act may allow the disclosure of audio transcripts,” Sugrue wrote to Kane, two other Kane subordinates and to DanburyState’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky, who is directing the investigation of the killings.