Gay Scout Adviser Sues to Get Post Back : Courts: El Cajon police officer says if he's not reinstated, he wants the Scouts kicked off city-owned property in San Diego.

Gay Scout Adviser Sues to Get Post Back : Courts: El Cajon police officer says if he’s not reinstated, he wants the Scouts kicked off city-owned property in San Diego.

By MARK PLATTE

Dec. 15, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

An El Cajon police officer expelled from his adviser’s post with the Boy Scouts of America because he is a homosexual has sued to be reinstated.

If he is not reinstated, he wants the Scouts kicked off city-owned property in San Diego.

Chuck Merino, a 37-year-old officer who organized an Explorers post with the Boy Scouts through the El Cajon Police Department in 1988, was told in September that “a homosexual role model” was not welcome as a member of the Scouts’ San Diego County chapter.

The news prompted San Diego’s police chief to sever that department’s 25-year-old ties with the Boy Scouts and brought a sharp rebuke by the San Diego Human Relations Commission, which called on the city to terminate its leases with the Scouts immediately.

At a press conference Monday, Merino said he was pained to have to sue the Scouts and seek their expulsion from the group’s city-leased headquarters in Balboa Park and property on Fiesta Island, but believed he had been personally attacked.

The lawsuit was filed Friday in San Diego Superior Court.

“I wish I could return back to the way it was before I got the suspension letter,” said Merino, who joined the El Cajon police force in 1977. “But I feel I’ve been picked on and discriminated against. They basically said I’m not fit to be an adult leader who can work with kids.”

Ron Brundage, president and Scout executive with the San Diego County chapter of the Boy Scouts of America, said Monday he would have no comment on the lawsuit until he had seen its contents.

John Kaheny, an assistant city attorney in San Diego, said he was expecting Merino’s lawsuit, which would probably force the issue of whether the Scouts can remain at their headquarters in Balboa Park for $1 a year and continue operating an aquatic center on Fiesta Island without payment to the city.

The lawsuit asks that the Boy Scouts reinstate Merino as the head of the El Cajon Explorer Post, a voluntary, unpaid position, and that the organization’s policy of excluding gays be held unlawful.

If Boy Scout officials change their policy and allow Merino back into the group, the El Cajon police officer said he will drop the lawsuit and any further efforts to have the Scouts removed from San Diego city property.

“They have the choice of whether they want to keep that property or not,” Merino said. “It’s their policies that may cause them the right to lose the use of that land.”

Scout leaders probably discovered that Merino was gay about a year ago when he helped organize a citizens group to patrol Hillcrest, which was notorious for physical assaults on gays, Merino said.

The Boy Scouts sent Merino a letter in August, telling him that his registration with the Scouts had been suspended but never telling him why.

When Merino sought a reason in writing, Brundage explained in a second letter that, while the Scouts recognized and respected the rights of anyone to conduct “alternate lifestyles, we do not believe that a homosexual role model is consistent with that which Scouting families want for their youth.”

Merino, he said, “made the decision regarding (his) membership in our organization . . . when (he) publicly proclaimed (his) personal values and lifestyle to be inconsistent with the well-publicized values of the Boy Scouts of America.”

Although Merino is seeking monetary damages, his attorney, Everett Bobbitt of San Diego, said Monday that too will be forgotten if the Scouts change their policy.

Bobbitt, a former El Cajon police officer who supervised Merino at one time, represents mostly law enforcement officials.

“Chuck is nothing but a sterling example of what I would like to see in a police officer,” Bobbitt said. “If he was leading a group that included my son, I would be very happy to have that kind of role model for my son. Chuck is a valuable member of the Police Department and a valuable leader of young men and we shouldn’t lose that.”

The flap over Merino caused the California Highway Patrol to review its ties with the Boy Scouts. It has recently decided to continue its participation in the Explorer program.