For Matt Comer, the Boy Scouts of America's recent announcement that it would consider reversing a ban on gay members is personal. The QNotes editor was kicked out of the organization at 14 for being gay. He gathered reactions to the announcement from the business world, the gay community and others in a recent blog.

He writes:

The news of this week is stunning, reversing decades of exclusion of gay men and boys from participation in the nation's preeminent organization for training and equipping young men with the tools, principles and values necessary for becoming good citizens.

But, as he points out later in the blog, the announcement has received mixed reviews. Gay advocates say it isn't enough, since the organization would lift the national ban and replace it with a policy that gives individual chapters the power to decide who they would and would not allow into their group. Regardless, Comer says, it's a step toward progress.

...for an organization that has consistently, as recently as last July, upheld their anti-gay policies time and time again, this one small step backing away from discrimination is a milestone unlike any other - the first and only time thenational leaders of the Boy Scouts of America have signaled they are ready to accept openly gay boys and young men into the honored and storied tradition of American Scouting.

Read Comer's blog here.