#NotAllScouts
Not even close. Although the religious aspects seem to have become more prominent in recent years, it’s specifically non-denominational.
For all intents and purposes, when I was a Cub and Boy scout in the 1980s, it was non-religious. Our troop had Methodists, Catholics, Baptists, Hindus, Jews and a few atheists. It just wasn’t an issue. And it wasn’t any more homophobic than society in general at the time either.
What I have noticed is that as a kid, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts never had much in the way of religious requirements- you could go work on your specific religious award, if you chose, but the actual advancements didn’t actually have any religious aspects to them that I recall. Now they have some faith based requirements that are nondenominational. For my part as a den leader, I’m just telling the parents that it’s up to them, and I’m going to count them done by the end of the school year. None of my business.
The Boy Scouts were put in multiple no-win situations.
Ban gays? You’re homophobic.
Allow gays? Conservative Christians and LDS then bail out.
Don’t allow girls? You’re sexist.
Allow girls? You’re poaching girls from the Girl Scouts.
Thinking queer people are human beings worthy of respect is a pretty mainstream view these days. You may not think so, because people tend to live in fairly durable bubbles, but it happens to be true. Sorry if finding out you’re in a minority is traumatizing. I’m sure you’ll be able to find people willing to sell you the notion you’re still part of a community with long-term relevance; lots of people make money by lying to their clients.
Be homophobic, or offend those that are homophobic.
How is this a no-win situation?
This was my experience as well as a young’un. My family was non-religious and I was very uncomfortable with the oaths. I was often singled out by pack leaders as that non-church non-God kid and it never felt inclusive. The activities were fun, but the struggle for inclusion in a group that didn’t want me was not. I left after a year or two of it.
Doing the latter appears to be costing the Boy Scouts a significant portion of their remaining base of Scouts and involved parents. One might argue “good riddance,” but for an organization fighting against a membership death-spiral, every Scout, and every troop, that leaves the organization is one more step down the path to non-existence.
If pandering to homophobes is the price they have to pay to survive…
I was a Boy Scout (and an Eagle Scout) growing up, as was my son. I have also been a Scout leader since 2004.
We all received an email last night from the national BSA organization informing us of this bankruptcy filing. We are told that it should not significantly affect the local councils and troops, as they are “legally separate, distinct and financially independent from the national organization.”
In the email we were sent, they note that the filing was necessary due to “increasing financial pressure on the BSA from litigation involving past abuse in Scouting.” They say the intent of the filing was “to achieve two key objectives: equitably compensate victims who were harmed during their time in Scouting and continue to carry out Scouting’s mission for years to come.”
They also note that:
Personally, I have been involved with four Boy Scout troops and two Cub Scout Packs in four states over the past 40+ years of my life. I have never seen any unit that discriminated against any boy, whether for sexual orientation or religious reasons (or any other reason). None have enforced the national organization’s requirement for religious belief, saying it was a personal matter. None enforced the prohibition against LGBT youth or leaders, even before the rules were finally changed on the national level. My current unit is chartered by a church, but it doesn’t push its faith on any of the boys in the unit. (Our family is nominally a member of a different faith entirely, but in reality we are non-religious.)
On the other side of the ledger, Boy Scouts helped me and my son develop leadership skills, and also taught us about citizenship, first aid, emergency response, swimming/lifesaving, canoeing/kayaking, and outdoor skills. Every knot I know I learned in Boy Scouts. I learned how to hike, camp, cook in the outdoors, canoe, row, sleep outside in single-digit weather, and even how to downhill ski. The first scuba mask my son ever put on was at a BSA jamboree, and now he’s a certified diver going with me to the southern Caribbean later this spring. All of this was great for my son, who was not the type to get into competitive team sports. Were it not for Boy Scouts, he would have grown up doing little more than video games.
This past weekend, I organized our troop’s sixth annual ski trip. (A local ski resort lets us sleep overnight on the floor of the lodge after hours.) Several boys who were new to our troop and who had never put on skis before skied down the beginner hills for the first time. The total cost per boy was about $100, including lift ticket, rental, lesson, overnight stay, meals, and transportation. The boys who didn’t want to ski could go snow tubing instead.
Our troop actually has a monthly outdoor campout or other event year-round. This year our troop went on local backpacking trips in Connecticut, a hiking trip in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a 50-mile bike trek on Cape Cod, and a 60-mile canoe trip down the Allagash River in Maine. Like all BSA troops, all of our leaders are volunteers, so our expenses are very low. We also do fundraising to offset expenses (car washes, a flower sale, and paper shredding).
We also do community service, including minor projects like helping out the Town with spring cleanup and local hiking trail maintenance, as well as larger projects (often in conjunction with Eagle Scout service projects).
I honestly think BSA has a lot to offer our youth and communities, and I haven’t seen any other organization that is comparable. It would be a real shame if it ever goes away.
Don’t get me wrong – I think that they finally took a step towards inclusion and away from hatred when they removed the ban on gay Scouts and leaders (though, as was noted upthread, that action still allowed for local Scout organizations to keep on doing it).
But, that’s the no-win nature of the situation: keep pandering to the homophobic wing of the Scouts, and find yourself increasingly seen as irrelevant and hateful by the broader society, or allow gays into the organization, and drive away a significant fraction of your membership (while probably not really moving the needle very much on how you’re seen by people outside of Scouting).
It does have a lot to offer, and the path to its continued survival goes right through the national organization becoming as open and inclusive as your local packs, and forcing everyone who isn’t on board with that to leave. Keep up with mainstream society, in other words, which should be completely uncontroversial for something like the BSA. There’s nothing else which comports with the morality of scouting, and there’s certainly nothing else which will allow them to survive into the next generation.
Society has changed so much and there’s so much BSA history and baggage that it’s probably best if they make a significant pivot and start clean. Change their name to “Kid Scouts Association” and allow anyone to join. The BSA name is always going to have people impose certain expectations on it. They need to distance themselves from that and move forward in a more inclusive direction.
They didn’t require recitation of this oath?
“If you’re lucky, they won’t enforce their rules against you” doesn’t impress me.
I was a BS for a few years. The scout master was really weird. The word among the scouts was to always stay in a tent different from him.
Anyway, the troop fizzled out. Can’t imagine why.
Yeah, this has been a problem. Some basic checking would cut down on 90% of the problems. Instead they worked the other way.
Screw 'em.
Have you (or your children) ever recited the Pledge of Allegiance?
I treat the references to God in the Boy Scout Oath just like I do the the Pledge of Allegiance and the inscription of “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency – as examples of ceremonial deism.
Wasn’t Boy Scout membership mandatory for young boys in the Mormon church for some years?
I was a Boy Scout in a troop in rural Tennessee nearly 40 years ago (early '80s), and no Scout was ever in the same tent as any adult. The adults all had their own tents, just like today. We also always had at least two adults present, just like today. (We also have additional rules today, like no adult being alone with any youth for any reason.* I’m sure it was a good idea then, too, but it didn’t become a formal rule until sometime later.)
No idea if they did background checks back then, but when I became a leader in 2004, I had to give permission for them to conduct a full background check on me. The Youth Protection rules were in place by then, too.
*For example, on our ski trip this past weekend, one of our Scouts was injured (did a face plant on a jump in the terrain park). He was wearing a helmet, but they thought he might have broken his nose. Anyway, the ski patrol EMT in the First Aid Station said he should be looked at in the ER, so we had to drive him to the nearest hospital. Our Scoutmaster couldn’t drive him by himself, though. Another adult had to go with him. That’s the rules.
That article isn’t too awful - the writer seems to be making an effort to stick to the facts, most of the time. The article is honest enough to recognize that the BS organization played a role in its own downfall.
Still, the notion that the ho-mo-sekshuals played a key role in destroying the Scouts doesn’t seem particularly convincing. In the early 2000s, I did not want my son to join the Boy Scouts precisely because they discriminated against LGBT people. Absent convincing evidence that parents like me were too insignificant in number to matter, I question the idea that allowing gay scoutmasters played much of a role in the organization’s decline. Had the Scouts changed their policy a few years earlier, I would have gladly signed my son up.
Never a brownie, but I was a Girl Scout for 2 years. The asshat who was the egotist in charge felt we all had to learn contract bridge, how to throw a tea party, when to wear white or not whatever the hell, and to ALWAYS wear a bra [when those of us who were just starting didn’t actually HAVE tits at the time …] She was into brainwashing us to be that pearl clutching debutante type, apparently.
You should see some of the article I saw that were awful.
(Heck, here’s two of them.)