Eagle Scout Steven Cozza thinks the Boy Scouts of America should either live up to their name or start calling themselves the Boy Scouts of Part of America.
Cozza, who is straight, is on a crusade against the BSA's policy of excluding homosexuals from its membership and leadership. He first challenged the policy formally when he was 12 and wrote to the BSA as part of earning a Boy Scout merit badge for citizenship.

He followed up with letters to newspapers and a refusal to publicly recite the Scout Law at meetings. Cozza maintained that the BSA was not observing that law, which includes the words, "You should respect and defend the rights of all people." When he was 13, Cozza co-founded Scouting For All, a non-profit group dedicated to making scouting open to everyone.

Cozza quit scouting in protest when his father, a scoutmaster, and another Petaluma scoutmaster were fired by the BSA for supporting the right of gay boys and men to be involved in scouting.

"Scouting is great," says Cozza. "I just have a problem with discrimination."

Now 16, Cozza gives speeches, marches in parades, organizes protests and maintains a Scouting For All website. He formed a gay/straight alliance group at his high school and kicked off a petition drive that has collected more than 64,000 signatures of people protesting the BSA's policy.

Cozza has received threats and hate mail, and in June of 2000 his cause was dealt a blow when a five-to-four vote of the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Boy Scouts, as a private organization, to discriminate in its polices.

 Though the Supreme Court decision was a disappointment, Cozza is undaunted. Since the ruling, Cozza and Scouting For All have campaigned to cut public support for the Scouts, maintaining that public funding and facilities should not be used by private groups that discriminate. Scouting For All has also been working to put more local control into scouting so that membership rules can be determined locally rather than at the national level where the BSA has now formally renounced gays and declared local decision-making on the issue unacceptable.

Cozza has called on the United Way and all public schools to withdraw their support until the BSA is truly democratic. He has urged the president to "leave no child behind" by pressing the BSA to change its policy and withdrawing as its honorary president until they do.

"Scouting teaches us to stand up for what we believe in, and that's what I'm doing," says Steven Cozza. "I'm just being a good scout."