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The Boy Scouts of America, now Scouting America, can trace its destruction to the policies of the Democratic Party. Like most institutions in America – especially in the cultural realm – the organization has been feminized and stripped of its original mission.
In many ways, what happened to the Boy Scouts reminds me of the subject of Anne E. Larson’s 2009 book, ‘Love in the Ruins: Modern Catholics in Search of the Ancient Faith,’ in which the author writes about how her church has been radically altered during her lifetime.
A look back:
In 2019, the Boy Scouts of America renamed its organization Scouts BSA. This occurred just one year after allowing girls to join despite the fact that girls already had a time-honored option: the Girl Scouts. This leads to the curious question: Why were girls given the option to join the boys or remain with their own kind (and sell Girl Scout cookies), while boys were given no option at all: If they didn’t like sharing their campfire experience with girls, they could either get used to it or exit scouting altogether. Girls get two options, boys get one. That’s woke feminism at its most basic level.
Did the masterminds behind this change want to attract masculine tomboy girls turned off by the “sissy” idea of selling cookies? After all, one of the tenets of feminism is that girls – women – can do anything men can do because there are no differences in the sexes when it comes to natural abilities.
The change was more likely related to smoothing out the damage caused by a sexual abuse scandal that exploded in 2023, when it was revealed that some 80,000 former Boy Scouts had filed abuse claims against scoutmasters who allegedly molested them. That scandal – this includes the billions paid to the abused former Scouts – forced the organization into a 2.4 billion-dollar bankruptcy claim that permitted the Scouts to keep operating while the abuse claims were processed.
The Boy Scouts, however, knew as far back as 2020-2021 that an abuse-centered tsunami was coming its way, and so they secretly sought bankruptcy protection.
The year 2024 saw many GOP lawmakers slam the Boy Scouts’ name change. They charged that, “Wokeness destroys everything,” although Democrat politicians were silent on the issue (they were still trying to define what a woman is). Shortly after the name change, the Scouts revealed a big gain in membership of about 16,000 new members, many of them girls, while lauding its national membership at over 1 million members – thanks to girls.
Go woke, go broke. Go co-ed, don’t go broke. But the Scouts weren’t really worried about going woke at all.
Back in 2013, the Boy Scouts began accepting gay youths, something that took them many years to do despite the fact that the Scout Oath at that time included a promise to be “morally straight,” which really had nothing to do with sexual orientation but with an individual’s moral character apart from sex.
It is good to recall that in 2013, the gay movement was only incidentally about transgender individuals. Nobody, especially the Boy Scouts, imagined that one day the transgender movement would control the gay movement and be its leading light.
Before making a decision to admit transgender youths in 2017, in 2015 the organization accepted gay men as troop leaders. We don’t know what kind of men with bizarre sexual propensities applied for the job. Were they pedophiles disguised as gays or gay men with a fatal weakness for adolescent boys? It’s a certainty that con artists slipped through the cracks because since that time more than 7800 of those former adult leaders were cited in sexual abuse claims.
In 2012, The New York Times reported,
“Officials with the Boy Scouts fought in the courts for years to prevent the release of the documents – more than 15,000 pages detailing accusations of sexual abuse against 1,247 scout leaders between 1965 and 1985, with thousands of victims involved, perhaps many thousands – contending that fear of breached confidentiality could inhibit victims from reporting other instances of abuse.”
Finally, in 2017, the Scouts – no doubt influenced by the tremendous strides the trans movement had made within the gay movement as well as in society at large – capitulated to the times and allowed transgender boys to join the organization. Gone was the old policy that only permitted boys to join the Scouts who were listed as male on their birth certificate.
While the inclusion of girls seemed to save Scouting America’s financial problems, behind the scenes, there were no reports on how girls actually fared on camping expeditions, hiking in the woods, or on multi- night campouts. And what about private girl things like menstruation and Kotex pads during jamborees and on long walks in the forest?
What about unit cohesion with girls lagging behind boys on long hikes? What about the occasional adolescent romance that might cause a rupture in the group?
Usually it is the feminine influence in co-ed organizations once exclusively male that eventually dominate and rule. Boys with other boys are economical and straight up; getting dressed in an instant, a quick pee in the woods (can you do that with girls?), putting up and taking down tents in record time with no gossip or being sidetracked with standard girly things. (Unless, of course, the girls are young butch lesbians.)
For a Manhattan second it looked like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would save the Boy Scouts when he came out on X announcing that Scouting America will require its members to use their “biological sex at birth and not gender identity.” Hegseth then went on to explain that applications will list only options for male and female and the one checked must match the applicant’s birth certificate. Youths of opposite genders assigned at birth cannot share bathrooms, tents or other similar spaces, he added.
Prior to Hegseth’s post, the Pentagon claimed that Scouting had “lost its way” and called the organization’s DEI efforts “unacceptable.”
Yet despite Hegseth’s plan to “de-woke” Scouting America, we have the LGBT Advocate reporting that,
Scouting America on Friday pushed back on claims by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the organization would limit membership based solely on sex assigned at birth, insisting that transgender youth remain welcome in its programs.
The statement contradicts Hegseth’s claims that the organization is rolling back participation rules amid the Trump administration’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across federal agencies.
In a memo to members issued after the Department of Defense announcement, Scouting America President and CEO, Roger Krone wrote that, ‘Scouting America will continue to welcome and serve all youth. That commitment is unwavering.’
But the rules governing who can join, according to Krone, are not being altered.
If this is true, then Scouting America is treating Hegseth and the Defense Department’s reform of Scouting America as a joke. Halfway measures rarely work but tend to create confusion.
A real reform – and one that must take place – would reinstate the original name, the Boy Scouts of America, and send the girls back to the Girl Scouts to sell their cookies.
