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S.C.O.U.T.S.
Hey, Boy Scouts of America, did you really think knuckling under to the Social Left was going to enhance your viability as an organization? You’re losing membership, and the Girl Scouts (a left-wing cookie distributing organization aligned with Planned Parenthood) are warning you not to poach any girls to make up for the boys who looked at your transgender initiative and banning water gun fights and said, “Not for me.”
“I formally request that your organization stay focused on serving the 90 percent of American boys not currently participating in Boy Scouts … and not consider expanding to recruit girls,” wrote GSUSA President Kathy Hopinkah Hannan in a letter sent this week to the president of the Boy Scouts of America, Randall Stephenson.
Top leaders of the two youth organizations, both struggling to stem membership declines, conferred this month about possibilities for coordination. But Hopinkah Hannan, in her letter, said she came away from that discussion feeling the Boy Scouts had already committed to an expansion of coed programs that would damage the Girl Scouts.
The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts should just merge and become the Socially Conscious Organizations United to Transform Society (SCOUTS) and indoctrinate the youth that boys suck and girls are wonderful; which will put them in line with current public education and children’s TV programming messaging.
They might have to stop selling cookies though. I mean, how socially conscious can you be and still encourage childhood obesity? Instead, we can all look forward to young S.C.O.U.T.S. ambushing us outside Kroger selling “Gluten-Free Kale and Free Trade Quinoa Bars.”
Meanwhile, Trail Life USA — an organization that embraces all that “toxic masculinity” stuff like shooting, water gun fights, horsing around, courage, rugged individualism — has come along to fill the void created when the Boy Scouts abandoned those things.
Published in Culture
Scouts Canada went fully co-ed in 1998.
Today, membership in Scouts Canada is about 61,000 youth.
Membership in the single-sex Girl Guides of Canada is about 74,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouts_Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_Guides_of_Canada
I don’t think you can have more than 100% decline! #mathishard
There is a certain wisdom to thinking that the admission of young women might result in an increase in young men.
The rules are different north of the border, eh? Maybe it’s due to the exchange rate.
You mean, the number of young men on the rise?
(I can’t believe I wrote that. It must be Friday.)
Look, we all make math mistakes from time to time…
Besides, when I looked at the comparative numbers between Scouts Canada and the Girl Guides, I discovered that a) the 90,000 figure was too high, and b) Scouts Canada has actually declined MORE than the Girl Guides has, so I edited my comment substantively.
True – every time my wife needs to calculate a percentage she calls me make sure she has the right number on top and on the bottom.
The cookies don’t even taste as good anymore.
I wonder what these organizations are looking at which leads them to think that uni-sex is the source of their problems. Especially considering that the BSA already had a co-ed program for decades (explorers, sea scouts, venturing crews). No, the biggest problem is a massively changed culture followed by program offerings that are boring. Wanna know a secret? Good troops (like the one my son is in), with more participation than they can handle, exist because they do cool things. Not just any old cool things, but cool things which also use the methods of scouting to achieve the aims of scouting. Bad troops scraping the bottom and desperate for participants simply don’t. Further, they don’t let the scouts direct their own activities.
So now the activities are supposed to be more attractive to all kids somehow? Hasn’t happened that way with sports, hobbies, or much of anything else as far as I can tell.
I’ve looked at other options, but all of them are too explicitly Christian for my tastes. Scouting is different than religion and I want to keep it that way. I’m ok with overlap, but this is a different thing which serves different needs and I’m just despondent that BSA is doing this and that there is no good alternative for my tastes.
Oh well, perhaps I’ll just get together with other neighborhood dads to teach our boys the ways of scouting without the benefit of a sanctioning body. Isn’t that the way it started anyway? Scouting For Boys being something a boy could do on his own, with his buddies, for their simultaneous enjoyment and benefit?
Those Samoas though.
Up here in the Great White North, the main alternative is the Cadet Corps run by the military.
Its membership is currently about 53,000.
I haven’t been able to find historical numbers, so I can’t tell you if that number has increased since Scouts Canada went co-ed, but then again the Cadet Corps has been co-ed since 1975.
Scouting in America remains a fairly bottom-up organization. The national organization makes pronouncements from above as it does, but a lot still depends on the local troops. One of my high school classmates has been a GSA Leader (whatever it’s called there) for a troop in her community for years. She’s a conservative, religious, and traditional-valued woman. She doesn’t worry about pronouncements from above and will argue her organization is still a good one.
The problem the national organizations have is that there’s a metric carp-ton of media pressure demanding they kowtow to their various whims, and so nationally they have trouble.
But the meat of what’s going on is still at the local level, and it’s a good lesson to take over all. If we want to change things culturally and socially, we need to be involved locally and provide a positive outlet.
I thought the deal the BSA had with the Mormons stopped all of this stuff and supplied them with guaranteed members. Did something happen to it?
Well, the previous administration had been hostile towards the BSA and traditional values, and so could make things more uncomfortable for them than usual. Given the former president’s pettiness, it’s not much of a surprise the national organization finally relented to many demands.
This has been my experience with my daughters Girl Scout Troop. They have large membership and continue to grow. Most of the leaders are at least nominally Christian. They do not push a left leaning program or even address hot button social issues.
They have fun, do projects and go camping. Nothing that touches political.
My wife just this year took over as the girl scout leader for my daughter’s troop. It used to be, well, bad. Previously they had very few meetings, no camping or outdoors, few crafts, few vocational exploration outings, and whatever events they had were not scouting related (one of the few was daddy daughter dance). She’s now changing the program in the direction you describe; I hope it takes off. At the very least I know my daughter and her friends will get a good and worthwhile experience.
This reminds of when we Catholics decided to add altar girls in addition to altar boys. The interest in boys serving at the altar quickly declined, and now many Masses I attend have no servers at all, and when they are there, they are almost always girls.
In my opinion, too many Mothers are involved. They are turning Boy Scouts into an extension of Cub Scouts.
Case in point: a few years ago, my son’s troop went to Yellowstone for summer camp. On the way, we stopped at a campground that had a river running by it. It was a fairly strong current, and there was a small island in it. The boys got the idea to visit the island. With adult supervision, the older boys swam across with ropes and established a line for the younger boys to use to cross. everyone had loads of fun and no one was harmed.
One of the mothers found out afterward and the father who was Scout Master at the time suddenly wasn’t anymore. Since then, all camp out meals must be gluten free, boy leadership is down, older boy participation has ceased, most camp outs are only at camporees.
It’s not leftism, it’s nannyism. The troop is sponsored by a church, and there is a strong religious component, and the homosexual and transgender changes have had no impact.
The LDS Church no longer participates with the BSA on programs for teens. It still cooperates with the BSA on programs for younger boys… but change is clearly in the wind.
I take your meaning and agree wholeheartedly. Although if I were SM I might not have ok’d that particular river crossing plan either! But I know the principle you’re speaking of and it’s poison to participation and interest, and there’s room for differences in judgement on our side of the ideological river.
Yup.
This is what the kids want, especially camping.
And I’m certain that, once the infrastructure is in place, LDS will completely abandon BSA.
Beginning with Baden Powell, BSA was limited to boys based on the interests of actual boys. Later research demonstrated clearly that a boys – only program is what boys want at the ages primarily addressed by BSA. It was not some willy-nilly, sexist prejudice. They knew exactly what they were doing, and why. There was a lot of pressure on BSA to admit girls, starting, oh, probably 50 years ago. There was immense pressure put on BSA not to admit girls – by GSA. It would have led to the demise of GSA, and they knew it. It did lead to GSA revamping their programs a lot. BSA did go ahead an admit girls to the Exploring program, starting at age 14, because their research showed that around that age, admitting girls would no longer tend to drive out boys. The Exploring program itself was revamped starting around 1970, and it proved to be a good thing.
All is not exactly lost, though. Troops, Packs, Posts, etc. are essentially owned by the sponsor. That is, a sponsor takes Scouting as the basis for their youth program. So a sponsor is free to set its own criteria for leaders, particularly. This is what made Scouting palatable for the LDS church for so long. But the last change at the national level has proven to be “a bridge too far” for LDS. And not a few other sponsors are dropping their sponsorships of units as well.
Our local BSA troop dropped a bunch of the rugged stuff because of insurance liabilities, not out of leftism or unisex, etc., but the troop is otherwise much the same.
My wife was a Girl Scout leader for a few years. She got the monthly mailings, which were liberal-ish but not radical or progressive. The most annoying thing was an earnest habit of repeating truisms in all caps, as in “Girl Scouting is about the GIRL”, just so you don’t get confused.
One note that might touch on the OP: For years, Girl Scouts have lagged as fundraisers, and they tend to suffer from BSA envy, as if the relative success of the Boy Scouts is somehow related to GSA’s second tier status.
I would love to see some stats on the female leaders of Scouts Canada troops vs. the female leaders of Girl Guide troops. I hypothesize that Girl Guide troop leaders might be less likely to be the mothers of the girls in the troop. I’ve known a couple of Girl Guide troop leaders, and neither of them were mothers at all. They were simply former Girl Guides who loved the organization and wanted to remain a part of it.
I always had the idea that Cub Scouts was largely woman-directed because small boys were accustomed to moms and school teachers telling them what to do. Boy Scouts was supposed to get boys accustomed to the world of men–obeying commanding officers and bosses. Scouting’s role as preliminary military training was still operative back in my day.
:-) It was a 60% decline.
That “preliminary military” was a big inroad into starting the change. Some quasi governmental arm objected to Boy Scouts being “paramilitary” and all camouflage prints and military looking gear is now banned at official Scout camps. They had to eschew any apparent connection to military in order to retain the shooting sports. I had a camo bandanna one year at a camp out and got chewed out for it. “You are jeopardizing our camp out!”
Yes and….
This training isn’t only a one way street to becoming an automaton. Part of the equation of giving and taking orders is that people must be prepared for and understand both roles, people must be prepared to navigate seriously wrong or even dangerous commands (or even just full-of-it commanders), people must be prepared to execute the gist of orders amid uncertainty and changing circumstances, scouting was always more than just being a grunt: there is an independence and self-reliance to it more than just marching along the route the scouts laid out for them.
Otherwise it does seem to be more difficult for the moms to change roles from cub scouts to boy scouts. I won’t speculate too much on the cause of that, but I suspect the real reasons are out of favor with the current field of social sciences.
Oh, and don’t forget that little kids of cub scout age can be annoying. My own kids are fine, but it’s rough enduring the little kids of others sometimes. I think women, on average, have a higher capacity for absorbing the annoying. So perhaps men just steer clear until the annoying subsides to the more manageable surliness of pre-teen to teen boys.
https://youtu.be/hoEVPtVk9nE