The city of Philadelphia has hiked the rent paid by the Boy Scouts’ Cradle of Liberty Council — by $199,000 per year. City officials notified scout leaders that the chapter must pay “fair-market rent” for its city-owned headquarters because the chapter refuses to admit homosexual scouts. The Cradle of Liberty council in 2003 adopted a nondiscrimination policy,  but was ordered to rescind it by the National Council, which said local councils cannot deviate from national rules. The Washington Times reports:

The organization’s Cradle of Liberty Council, which pays $1 a year in rent, must pay the increased amount to remain in its downtown building past May 31, Fairmount Park Commission president Robert N.C. Nix said Wednesday. City officials say they cannot legally rent taxpayer-owned property for a nominal sum to a private organization that discriminates. The city owns the land on which the council’s 1928 Beaux Arts building sits.

Scout officials will ask the city solicitor for details on the appraisals that yielded the $200,000 figure, said Jeff Jubelirer, spokesman for the Cradle of Liberty Council. The higher rent money “would have to come from programs. That’s 30 new Cub Scout packs, or 800 needy kids going to our summer camp,” Mr. Jubelirer said. “It’s disappointing, and it’s certainly a threat.”

There’s a bizarre point of constitutional law involved in this case. The Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the Boy Scouts, as a private group, have a First Amendment right to bar homosexuals from membership because homosexual practice violates the group’s beliefs.

But the Scouts in 2004 lost another case, BSA v. Wyman, at the circuit level. The Supreme Court let stand a 2nd Circuit decision holding that it was constitutionally permissible to exclude the Scouts from a state charitable program because the Scouts excluded avowed homosexuals from leadership positions. (Meanwhile, homosexual activist organizations such as the Lambda Legal Defense Fund are allowed to participate in the state charitable campaign.)

The Boy Scouts appealed, arguing that the court was penalizing them for exercising a right that the Supreme Court said they had the right to exercise. But the high court declined to review the case. Constitutional attorney Walter Weber told me the 2nd Circuit’s opinion, which is now the prevailing precedent, says, essentially, that “there’s a difference between forcing someone to do something that violates their beliefs and making them pay a price for refusing to do it.”

A fine difference, indeed.