Chris Keener has filed suit against the Boy Scouts of America, alleging that he was fired for being gay after 22 years of service.
Keener’s lawyers claim that scouts’ Golden Empire Council in Sacramento conducted an “invasive internal investigation into his sexual orientation” before firing him. Plaintiff’s attorney Geoffrey Kors commented, “When the Boy Scouts of America invades its own employees’ privacy in a zealous effort to identify and ‘weed out’ gay employees, it is completely outside the bounds of the law.”
A spokesperson for the Golden Empire Council, Scott Johnson, denied charges that Keener was followed by a private investigator and was fired because of his sexual orientation. Johnson instead claimed that Keener was dismissed for accepted a discount from a local business, in violation of organizational rules. Keener and his council counter that other Scout employees had regularly accepted the same discount, yet were not fired.
In related news, the Matthew Shepard murder trial against 21-year-old Russell Henderson began today in Laramie, Wyoming. Aaron McKinney, 21 is also charged with kidnapping, aggravated robbery, and murder in Shephard’s beating death. The two men pretended to be gay and then lured Shepard from a bar before stringing him up on a fence, brutally beating him, and leaving him to die.
