James Dale spent a decade fighting the Boy Scouts of America after the organization expelled him for being gay. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the Scouts had a First Amendment right to exclude him.

Now, Dale is invoking that same constitutional principle in a new fight over the organization he once sued — arguing that the federal government cannot use its relationship with Scouting America to pressure the private organization into abandoning policies protecting LGBTQ people and other marginalized Scouts.

“I find myself in this interesting, ironic place where I’m defending the decision that expelled me,” Dale told The Washington Blade. “That said, Scouts, you have a First Amendment shield to protect yourselves from the DOD.”

Dale’s latest legal push began with a question about what exactly the Pentagon and Scouting America had agreed to.

In recent years, Scouting America has made significant progress toward becoming a more inclusive organization — from removing its bans on LGBTQ scouts and leaders, to providing opportunities for women and girls to participate in Scouting, to making Scouts of color feel more supported and visible within the organization.

Those changes angered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has never been a Scout, to the point that he threatened to sever the military’s longstanding ties with the organization.

Such a move would mean that the U.S. military would no longer provide medical and logistical support for the National Jamboree, the massive gathering of Scouts in West Virginia that typically draws about 20,000 participants. It would also prevent Scout troops from meeting on U.S. or overseas military installations, where many bases host active Scouting programs.

In February, before his threat was carried out, Hegseth announced that the Pentagon had reached an agreement with Scouting America that he said would refocus the organization away from diversity initiatives and other policies he characterized as “woke.” He again threatened to end the military’s longstanding support for the organization if it failed to comply within six months.

Hegseth also placed particular emphasis on Scouting America’s policies regarding transgender youth, saying the organization would require members to use their “biological sex at birth and not gender identity.”

But Scouting America President and CEO Roger Krone struck a different tone.

“We have transgender people in our program and we’ll have transgender people in our program going forward,” Krone told The Associated Press in February.

The conflicting messages prompted Dale to dig deeper.

He filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the memorandum between the Pentagon and Scouting America. When the Defense Department did not provide the document, Dale turned to attorney Isaac Park, a former Supreme Court clerk, and sued the department for its release.

“I wanted to get to the bottom of what deal had been struck with Scouting America under pressure,” Dale said. “What pressure did the Pentagon apply on a private youth organization that had a right to determine their own members?”

Park, who also spoke to the Blade, said they deliberately took a narrow approach to the FOIA lawsuit, seeking a single document rather than launching a broader fight over thousands of pages of government records.

“We had one document that we really wanted, which was this memorandum, and we were going to ensure that there’s like a lead-pipe, stone-cold case for disclosure,” Park said.

The strategy worked quickly.Three weeks after the lawsuit was filed, the Pentagon released the memorandum.

But the document did not end Dale and Park’s questions. Instead, they said, it raised new ones.

Hegseth had publicly described a six-month window for Scouting America to make changes. But the memorandum provides for an ongoing compliance mechanism, with reviews taking place every 90 days.

For Dale and Park, that raises the possibility that the Pentagon could continue pressing Scouting America to change its policies long after the February agreement was announced.

Park describes their concern as “jawboning” — government pressure on a private organization to achieve a desired policy outcome without directly ordering the organization to make a change.

“We saw in the weeks after the announcement of the memorandum changes being made to Scouting America’s policies,” Park said. “Them saying one thing, the department saying a slightly different thing, and our first question then was, of course, like, what is actually in this memorandum? Is this how they kind of got what they wanted?”

The memorandum, Park said, clarified some questions but did not account for other changes Scouting America made.

“That naturally arises: Well then, how did those changes come about?” he said.

Dale points to changes at Scouting America’s National Jamboree as an example of what he believes could be the result of the pressure.

The organization removed dedicated spaces for girls, Scouts of color and LGBTQ Scouts at the flagship event, which concluded last week.

“We see spaces for girls being eradicated, spaces for kids of color, spaces for gay people, for trans kids,” Dale said. “It happened at the flagship event of scouting, the jamboree.”

Dale said he fears similar changes could occur at the local level, including at Scout meetings and council events.

“All this document is empowering the government to keep pressing, keep putting pressure on Scouting America,” Dale said. “And what is that doing to American kids?”

The dispute is particularly striking because of Dale’s own history with the organization.

Dale had a long history with Scouting before the organization expelled him in 1990. At the time, he was a 19-year-old student at Rutgers University in New Jersey and was serving as an assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 73.

While attending Rutgers, Dale became co-president of the university’s Lesbian/Gay Student Alliance and was interviewed by The Star-Ledger about the health and well-being of LGBTQ students.

The interview made its way to Boy Scouts officials. The organization subsequently expelled Dale after learning that he was gay, describing him as an “active sodomite.”

Dale sued the Boy Scouts under New Jersey’s public accommodations law and initially won. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in his favor, finding that the state’s interest in preventing discrimination outweighed the organization’s claimed right to exclude him.

The Boy Scouts appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 decision in 2000, the Supreme Court reversed the New Jersey ruling, holding that forcing the Boy Scouts to accept Dale as an openly gay assistant scoutmaster would violate the organization’s First Amendment right to freedom of expressive association.

The Scouts had argued that homosexual conduct was inconsistent with the values it sought to instill in young people.

Dale was devastated by the ruling.

“I thought it was the wrong decision at the time,” he said.

But the constitutional protection the Supreme Court recognized in his case is now at the center of Dale’s argument against the Pentagon.

The Boy Scouts’ policies have changed dramatically since Dale’s case. The organization began allowing openly gay youth in 2013 and gay adult leaders in 2015. It later expanded its policies to include transgender youth and adults.

The Boy Scouts of America formally changed its name to Scouting America in 2025.

Dale said those changes were made voluntarily — precisely the kind of private organizational decision that the Supreme Court’s ruling in his case protected.

“They did it voluntarily,” Dale said. “They won the Supreme Court case against me.”

Now, he argues, Scouting America should invoke that same protection against the government.

Park said that is the central constitutional question behind their efforts.

“In 1990, when he was expelled from the Scouts for being gay, and in 2000, after a narrow 5-4 loss at the court, we were told that a private entity, an organization like Scouting, are allowed to set their own membership policies,” Park said.

Over the following two decades, Park said, Scouting America changed those policies on its own.

“We won the culture war,” Park said. “Organizations like Scouting America decided on their own, of their own free will, that actually what they want is to be inclusive with respect to gay youth, with respect to trans youth.”

The question now, Park said, is whether the government can pressure an organization to reverse those voluntary decisions.

“I think that the story here is that of jawboning,” Park said. “Our question has always been the how of how this administration is achieving whatever policy goals, whatever ideological outcomes that they want.”

Dale sees the issue as extending well beyond Scouting America.

“It’s not even about the scouting program,” Dale said. “It is, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s about really what the executive branch is doing to private organizations that have a right to set their own policies for membership.”

Park said the argument could appeal to people across the political spectrum.

“During the Biden administration, it was COVID policy, and it was the NRA that the right was screaming about jawboning,” Park said. “This is a bipartisan issue in the sense that no one thinks the government is allowed to do this.”

For now, Dale and Park are seeking more information.

Park said their review of the memorandum left them with additional questions about the Pentagon’s relationship with Scouting America and whether the 90-day compliance mechanism is being used to continue influencing the organization.

“Disclosure or transparency is the right remedy for this,” Park said.

Dale’s interest in Scouting is not merely legal.

He said he still believes deeply in the organization and had returned to involvement with Scouting only recently, after years away.

“I love scouting,” Dale said. “I fought for a decade to get back in scouting.”

That makes his current position all the more unusual.

The organization that once fought him in court is now the organization he is trying to defend from government interference.

“I never thought that would be the case,” Dale said. “That would be saving queer kids.”

Dale said he hopes Scouting America will ultimately stand up for the policies it adopted after his Supreme Court case.

“They didn’t want gay people in the ’90s. Fine, I thought that was wrong,” Dale said. “But now they want to have trans kids. They want to have girls. They want to have kids of color.”

“But Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth don’t want them to,” he said.

The Pentagon declined to comment on Dale’s allegations or the ongoing litigation.

“As a matter of policy, we do not comment on ongoing litigation,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Washington Blade via email.

The Blade also contacted Scouting America seeking clarification about its agreement with the Pentagon, including whether Hegseth or other Defense Department officials had pressured the organization to remove or alter policies protecting LGBTQ Scouts, girls, or Scouts of color.

Scouting America did not respond to a request for comment.

For Dale, the fight has brought his long-running legal battle with the Scouts full circle.

He spent the 1990s arguing that the organization should not be permitted to exclude him because he was gay. The Supreme Court ultimately said the Scouts had a constitutional right to make that choice.

Now Dale is arguing that the government cannot force the organization to make a different choice.

“I realized over the course of my life that I expected the institution to save me,” Dale said. “I expected the Boy Scouts of America to do the right thing. I expected the legal system, the Supreme Court, to do the right thing.”

“Neither one did,” he said. “You got to fight for yourselves.”