Yes. Once the results of the vote were made, the Pastor informed us that they might not recharter this Fall.
Anti-gay scouting parents pulling kids from Boy Scouts. Where will they go? Is there an alternative?
Thats nice. I have 75 boys in my Troop (ranging in age from 11 - 17), and all of the gear needed to take them and more camping. Boy Scout Troops are very different from Girl Scout Troops - this is WHY a place to meet and store gear can be a limiting factor to growth.
If your local schools are banning Scouts from the public schools, they could be in for a lawsuit under No Child Left Behind. Our Pack (chartered by a different org) meets at the local Public School.
Now if they ban EVERYONE from meeting, then they can get away with it.
Can’t you just find a church not run by arseholes? This is America. There’s a church every eight feet.
Yes - looking into options already. It really is the storage AND meeting place issue.
Plus the BSA is still half bigoted on this one - since they don’t allow adults. My church, for example, is a possibility - but the adult gay members will have to be sold. I plan on talking to a few people on Sunday about this.
Oh, I see. Good luck!
How much would commercial storage cost for the gear? Not a great solution by any means, but some fundraising or extra voluntary dues might be enough to cover it. At least as a short term solution.
Wait, so they abuse boys and make bourbon?
Which is what they’ve done. Because by Minnesota State law, they cannot provide accommodation to discriminatory organizations - so no one gets to meet in schools.
The problem is the half measure.
Enough to piss off those who will take what is to them a principled stance by leaing the organization or refusing to let their kids join - just like we took our kid out and as a community were kicked out (and formed a Camp Fire Boys pack) twelve years ago.
But not enough to make the organization inclusive enough to the rest of us.
Yes, what will happen is evolutionary. Those whose principles include viewing homosexuality as evil will now slowly be less common and the concept of accepting gays more normalized - in a few years the next step will happen. But meanwhile they will whither a bit I’d think.
Is your local council the Northern Star? They are the largest in Minnesota and had previously pubilcly stated that they would go aganst the BSA anti-gay ruling ... seems silly to have done that against them.
They’ve been withering for a while. The peak BSA membership (by this I mean packs, troops, and crews, and exclude exploring and Learning for Life, which are really only tangentially related to BSA as a whole), was in the late 1980s. Since Dale v BSA, membership is down by over 25%. I’ve heard some chatter (nothing official), that part of the vote was realizing they were limiting future membership, so better to take the hit now and hope people start coming back.
To some extent, the next vote will be easier, because the hardcore anti-gay crowd will leave now, and therefore there will be a less vocal opposition when the ban on gay adults is discussed in a few years.
Can you explain how they are different? Is it because of troop size, or activities, or what? Aside from my yearly cookie binge, I don’t have a lot of contact with scouts of either kind, and had thought that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were basically genderized versions of the same thing.
love
yams!!
I am an Eagle Scout and have had essentially no contact with the GSUSA. However, I do remember looking at a GSUSA handbook once for some of their badges and thinking that they generally looked much simpler than what I was doing at the time. (I was probably 16 or so at the time, so I could easily have been both arrogant and wrong.) BSA is still, even with all the other optional merit badges in any number of subjects, mostly about camping and hiking and other physical activities as well as things like first aid and citizenship. BSA facilities include Philmont in New Mexico, the Northern Tier in Minnesota/Canada, and the Florida Sea Base in the Keys. My troop did far too much of the car camping that Algher mentions and we were a very large troop (as large or larger than his) with a ton of gear. We took a pretty large space in the basement of our sponsoring church with all this gear. Moving everything for our week-long summer trip took us about two hours to move everything to the parking lot and load it into a rental truck. I probably went on eight or ten weekend trips a year plus the summer trip. There was also a yearly 50-mile hike (over Spring Break, which was easy to coordinate since it was one giant school district) and generally a yearly (or every couple years) trip to Philmont in the summer and also sometimes one of the weekend trips there in the winter (one of the benefits of only being a few hours drive from Philmont.)
BSA has a lot of problems right now, most of them self-inflicted, and they could really learn from the GSUSA on how to actually run their national organization. The people I’ve known who have been in Scouting for a very long time (both as boys and then as adults) have tended to blame National in Texas and the very strong Mormon influence over the last couple of decades.
One thing I think BSA has that no other organization has is the legacy of adults willing and able to dedicate time and energy to the organization long after their own kids have left. There are tons of third-generation Eagle scouts out there, and scouting families keep contributing: unlike most youth activities, it’s not something you quit just because your own kids have aged out–or lost interest. These people provide a tremendous amount of administrative, managerial, and financial support for the organization. Of course, some of those will be the ones that leave, but whatever organizations arise will not have the institutional memory to harness that as effectively.
I think of my uncle: he was an Eagle scout, his sons were both Eagle scouts, he’s been involved in the organization on all levels for over half a century. When his kids aged out but he was still working, because he knew the organization so well and understood its needs, he was able to find places that he could help that exactly matched the amount of time and effort he was willing to contribute–and he knew who to talk to to take on those responsibilities. Then, when he retired and had more time, he had been around long enough to know what additional things needed doing for the local council and how to step up for those. And, in the fullness of time, when he needs to step back, he will have enough ownership of the things he does and know enough people that he will make sure to pass those tasks off to other competent, willing volunteers.
There are thousands of people like my uncle, who all contribute maybe 200-500 hours a year. They make the organization possible. That sort of organizational inertia is very hard to get going, and gives BSA a huge advantage over other groups.