A year after the Boy Scouts of America voted to allow gay youth members, the organization voted as its new president Robert Gates, the former US defense secretary who oversaw the dismantling of the US military's own ban on gay troops.

The group's national council formally approved Gates as its president at an annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, where top members are convening to discuss the future of the organization.

But despite Gates' selection, the Boy Scouts show no signs of repealing their controversial ban on adult gay members, a stance that led the organization to shut down a Seattle troop in April because it refused to dismiss an openly gay scoutmaster.



In May 2013, BSA voted in favor of adjusting its membership rules to read: "No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.” The policy was implemented on 1 January 2014.

Gay-rights groups continue to campaign against the Boy Scouts for banning adult members. Members of Scouts for Equality delivered a 125,000 signature Change.org petition to the Amazon headquarters in Seattle on Wednesday, urging the company to stop donating money to BSA.

“This is a policy that currently is telling youth gay and straight that discrimination is okay and that’s a message that has no place in scouting at any level,” said Zach Wahls, an eagle scout and executive director of Scouts for Equality, a group that seeks to change the BSA’s ban on gay youth and gay leaders.

The BSA will place further limits on the amount of “open or avowed” gay members in its organization next year, when a rule that lowers the adult membership age from 21 to 18 for its Venturing, Sea Scouts and Order of the Arrow programs. For scouting, the adult membership age is already 18 and older.

Men from 18 to 20 years old will be required to meet adult membership standards, including the ban on gay adults, by the spring of 2015, according to NBC News.

The BSA did not respond to requests for comment.

These changes come just as Gates prepares to begin his two-year term as BSA president on Friday, a year to the day since the BSA changed its policy on gay members.

Gates, who served as secretary of defense under presidents Bush and Obama, was also previously the director of the CIA and a president of Texas A&M University. As secretary of defense, he oversaw a study on the effect of repealing the military's ban on gay servicemembers. When he presented the findings of the study in December 2010, Gates spoke publicly for the first time about his thoughts the ban, saying: "a policy that requires people to lie about themselves somehow seems to me fundamentally flawed.” The ban on gay service members serving openly was repealed that month.