“In a free society, organizations fail or flourish according to the private choices of innumerable families,” the Boy Scouts said in a brief to the United States Supreme Court in the 2000 case. “A society in which each and every organization must be equally diverse is a society which has destroyed diversity,” the Boy Scouts argued.

Jay L. Lenrow, who grew up in scouting as a Jewish boy in New Jersey, and stayed involved as an adult scout volunteer in Baltimore, where he works as a lawyer, said he thought that eventual acceptance of opposing views about gay leaders — troops and families and churches choosing different paths, to allow gay volunteers or not — will become an enriching element of the scouting experience going forward.

Mr. Lenrow called the decision to defer a vote on the proposed change “hugely disappointing.”

“As a youth in scouting, I sat in tents during the night after lights out with my Catholic friends and my Protestant friends, and kids who were Armenian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, and we would tell each other what it meant to us to be a member of our religious grouping and what the principles were and what we were taught,” he said. “What that led to is, first of all, an understanding of what made my friends tick and, second of all, an appreciation for their feelings and their religious beliefs.”

Others urged the board to hold firm to the ban when it resumes discussion in May. “Do not back off against the principles you’ve had for 100 years,” said Kelly Williamson, 52, a second-generation scout in the suburbs of Dallas. “Really, this is nothing against the gay community,” he added. “Have them form their own organization. It’s kind of ironic, gay scouts come in and saying, ‘We want you to change how you’ve done this for 100 years.’ ”

A national poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University said that 55 percent of voters supported opening up scouting to gay men and lesbians, to 33 percent opposed. The poll of 1,772 registered voters, taken from Jan. 30 to Feb. 4, after the proposed change was announced by the Boy Scouts, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points. Women, 61 percent to 27 percent, were more likely than men to favor dropping the ban. Among men, 49 percent approved ending the ban, compared with 39 percent opposed.