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Boy Scouts to Admit Girls. Sigh.
As announced today, the 100-year-old organization will allow begin allowing girls into scouting. As a parent and former Eagle Scout, I can think of a hundred reasons why this is a lousy idea. Here are the first few that come to mind.
- Overnight co-ed camping trips.
- Overnight co-ed camping trips with adults.
- The Girl Scouts have a nice thing going.
- Modifying traditional scouting activities because girls won’t do that.
- Modifying traditional scouting activities because boys want to do that.
- Like co-ed dorms, girls don’t civilize the boys. Quite the reverse.
- This appears to be a push by BSA leadership to expand membership — so yet another non-profit abandons its mission to support growth goals and keep grown-ups employed.
- It will increase pressure on Girl Scout troops to shut down/merge
- One more duck peck in the effort to convince the nation that there is nothing different between boys and girls
- Yet another non-profit that abandons its core mission to try and be a social services agency
- It basically implies that the Boys Scouts are better, and that real scouts are in that organization, not Girl Scouts.
- It implies there is nothing positive about all-girl activities
- Or all boy activities
- Dating Merit badge?
- How about That’s Not Funny Merit badge?
- He Said-She Said Merit Badge?
If this happens, BSA will be dead as a door nail and GSA will reign supreme.
I see this as being able to bring values long taught to boys to girls.
But girls need to be taught how to be women by women. If girls benefit from camping, survival, and hand skills, then GSA needed to focus on that.
That GSA has failed girls means we need an alternative to GSA. Not that BSA should be that alternative.
I’m glad there’s a place I can send my boys where teaching them and modeling for them is not going to be softened because girls are around. I put my son in this because he thought gorls are good and boys are bad, so he wanted to be a girl.
Putting girls in with boys opens BSA up to all the rot that infested GSA. You think GSA will survive this? Where do you think those leaders will go when GSA starts declining? How well, given BSA’s inability to stand firm on some of its most absolute principles, do you think they will prevent the rot from GSA to enter BSA? How long before boys in BSA are wishing they were girls to avoid the male bashing of GSA’s feminists?
I misunderstood the original change as it appears the Cub Scout Dens will remain single sex, but I doubt this will last long and still think the mission of BSA should focus on boys. It is just a matter of time before BSA caves into coed Dens, and I am sure the Pack meetings will be coed. There are no sacred spaces left for boys or men. For those who say BSA is too right of GS, that is not saying much. They have given into gays scouts and leaders, transgendered and now girls. They are unable to resist progressivism.
Harvey Weinstein just applied to be a scoutmaster.
Yes I think that BSA will not go the route of GSA. There are already women BSA leaders. There are women in BSA leadership. I think GSA should get its act together, but they are too far gone at this point. I think the BSA will be resistant to the rot.
And, what, pray tell, would you have me do, if I thought otherwise? Quit BSA in disgust? Pull my son out just before he earns the rank of Eagle? No. I, have long wanted BSA to do something for Girls, and I wish this was in place years ago, so my daughter could have participated.
Two deep leadership solves this issue. It has to be followed, but it makes the likes of him very difficult.
The American education system has for a long time been created by women for the betterment of girls to the detriment of boys. Scouting has long been an opportunity for boys to be exposed to new concepts and growth opportunities in their most fertile environments. There is no other path here. Boys and girls troops will be deemed separate but equal. Boys troops will be retarded to be kept in compliance with girls troops. The BSA has already been badly feminized to comply with social norms.
I was in Boy Scouts for one year. My parents were my den leaders. Looking back, it was a waste of time. My mom had no place in such an organization. She ruined the experience for all of us. It wasn’t her fault. Being a woman isn’t a fault. What I am a part of now with CSB is completely different. Boys must be socialized by men. The greatest crime in our society is that boys are being socialized by their peer group and by women. Many times, the men they meet are mere 40-year-old adolescents. If the BSA, changes their program one iota to make it more “inclusive” (this has already been happening for decades!), the whole thing fails.
Yes yes yes.
Plus, gay scouts and leaders have been present all along anyway. Because of that, I’m not sure why the policy needed to change, but having known many gay scouts and leaders already in the program that change didn’t exactly bother me. Hiwever, that change didn’t alter the fundamental mission of the Boy Scouts as an organization. This new policy does.
I was thinking more like a plug, but your way sounds less painful.
Us guys too, Carol. I’ve had someone sneer at me for this viewpoint, that I needed a “safe space”. Not a safe space, but a different and much needed experience than the usual mix and match. I have no problem with programs that are coed, and have participated in them happily. I have a problem with all programs being coed though, especially when it fundamentally changes the mission and reason for being of an organization like the BSA.
And knowing to use birch or willow (for their pain reducing and aspirin like qualities).
FWIW, the following bullet points were provided to me from the scoutmaster of the Greater Alabama Council in announcing this decision. I have a pending Eagle scout (finished his project just this past weekend, paperwork pending), and a Life Scout still plugging away. Anyway, here’s how our Council says this will play out for us (emphasis text in the original):
I have mixed feelings, and will be very interested to see how “programs” are actually implemented. But I did find it interesting to read the following quote from Baden-Powell, from his 1908 “Scouting for Boys” (pg 13):
Agreed. It’s not a question of better or worse. It’s a question of different. Coed programs are great, even as the existing subset of BSA. Boys only, though, is still the primary mission of the BSA and for good reason. Lose that, and the BSA loses appeal and we lose one shining light in the niche of boy-centered programming. Isn’t boy-centered programming still.important? If so, and if the BSA abandons that project, then where do we turn?
No problem with that, and there are organizations to do it. That’s just not the Boy Scouts. Aside from the value all kids get from coed programs, there is also value in unisex programs, and the bsa shouldn’t ditch it’s mission to chase after something else. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that.
To which Woody Allen responded: “No cuts, I was in line first.”
Did they include the words “at least for now” at the end?
Roman Polanski is quoted as saying: “it’s about time; maybe now I can return to the US and start a troop. Or maybe they’ll let me be a merit badge counselor. Do they have a Modeling for Youngsters merit badge yet?”
No. And neither will I choose to assume the worst. I will wait and see how it is implemented.
Me too. The rush to see this as negative as possible is telling of something.
That you’re on a site with a large number of conservatives who are leery of change?
Oh? Do tell. What is this something you’re referring to?
I think it’s straightforward: many of us think this is a negative conceptually, regardless of how it’s implemented. Not an injustice or anything like that, just a negative which is severely disappointing and demoralizing.
Not to get all Obama on you, but I think you are forcing those of us who disagree with the change into a false choice. Not allowing girls in Boy Scouts does not make me anti-girl, or anti-camping for females, or anti-civics for women. It makes me in favor of the organization remaining focused on its stated mission of teaching values to boys. I am leery of wholesale changes to one organization to in an effort alleviate weaknesses in another.
It is telling of the fact that every change is seen as a loss in the culture wars. I don’t agree.
My opinion was specifically requested, so yall have it. Since none of us can predict the future, I am not going to defend my opinion against hypotheticals.
Scouts Canada went fully co-ed in the 1990s.
Today, the Girl Guides of Canada has higher membership numbers than Scouts Canada does, and the number of boys enrolled in Scouts Canada has plummeted.
The Girl Scouts of the USA should stop whining. They’re going to do just fine out of this. Few mothers want their adolescent daughters going on camping trips with adolescent boys.
Oh, now that’s one I’d like to try!
This is a very interesting discussion.
I had (still have, my kids remind me whenever I use the past tense–they are all grown now, and I’m not in the mothering role I once was) two girls and then a boy. I was also a Brownie leader for about four years. I loved every minute of it. (I wrote about it here.)
Like most people, I have mixed feelings about this change to allowing girls into Boy Scouts.
On the plus side, the world these kids are growing up to join is a mix of men and women. When scouts started, the world was more segregated.
On the negative side, boys and girls are wired very differently especially through elementary school. After following my two kindergarten-ready daughters through school, I laughed at the world of boys. Wiggle worms, all of them. Fiddling and twiddling everything. I used to make the teachers laugh when I said, “If they put the beginner reader books on wheels and if those books were cars that said ‘Vroom vroom,’ the kids would be reading in the cradle!” I think the subjects and activities that interest boys are very different from the ones that interest girls. These kids are born that way.
The other problem I have with the mixed troops is that girls tend to be participators very young. Their hands shoot up instantly whenever something needs to be done. When the Catholic Church decided to let girls be altar servers, I noticed, what I predicted, that the boys withdrew. There are more girls doing it than boys in my community. The boys didn’t feel needed. Boys go where they are genuinely needed. That’s too bad, to see the boys not get this experience. Being an altar server is one of the few experiences little boys can have where they are expected to watch what’s going on and take initiative on their own without being asked. Everything else in their life is, “Sit down and be quiet. Wait until you are asked.”
In the end, the mixed troops will probably be okay. All of the kids love camping out, and at least through elementary school, whole families will be able to go and have fun together. Its success will depend on the personality of leaders, and it will vary from troop to troop.
Well . . . there is your two-deep leadership.
Seawriter