Boy Scouts USA to allow girls - Girl Scouts upset

Great Debates
41

I had heard on the news that it was Boy Scouts (specifically referencing the Eagle Scout program).

Boys and girls are equal, but they are still different. I’m all for equality, but I’m not crazy about this trend towards a “mono-gender” society.

I kind of feel like from my own experience both in the BSA and going to all-boys summer camps, as well as my college fraternity experiences, there is positive benefit to boys and girls belonging to single-gender groups where they can discuss and deal with topics specific to their gender.

That said, we are a long way from the days where Boys Scouts went camping and build canoes with their pocketknife while the Girl Scouts sold cookies and sewed merit badges (typically for sewing).

42

I think it makes sense to work toward gender integration. It’s happening everywhere else in society, and we’ve seen it done in other countries. If someone wants to form a single-gender club for kids, so be it. But I like the idea of The Scouts, as a large, American institution, working toward the goal of bringing the genders together and treating them equally. As I said above, I’ve been out of that institution for a long time, so I don’t have much of a sense of what needs to be done to prep for that. Maybe a lot of the changes have already been instituted.

I think the Separate but Equal analogy is a good one-- we should know by now that that doesn’t work.

43

Yeah, I think that this is the crux of it – BSA’s participation numbers have been declining for years, and their latest solution to this is to poach from another organization. Kind of uncool.

44

Why is that uncool? The “other organization” has the option of changing so that its members are not tempted to leave. No organization has a claim to its members. Your statement implies that the members exist for the organization, not the other way around.

45

IMO this.

As a single point of anecdata I have never heard of “Gold Award” before this very thread.

I was a Cub Scout as were my two bros, Dad was a Boy Scout leader for 2 years, and one of my bros did Boy Scouts up to but not including Eagle. So it’s not like I’m a total stranger to scouting as it was in the 1970s.

We’ve certainly had threads here before on the vast resume power conferred by being an Eagle scout. I was amazed to hear folks in hiring positions gushing about how much that meant to them, even for mid-career hires. :confused:

That the sorta-corresponding GS level is virtually unknown is just the crowning dingleberry on this whole shit sundae for girls/women.

46

Several people here have already commented that the Girl Scouts Gold Award is objectively harder to get yet the Eagle Scout badge is more widely known and appreciated by the general public. I imagine that should the opportunity be available, many girls who would otherwise have done the Gold Award would jump ship to get an Eagle Scout to save themselves somewhere on the order of 100 hours of work and earn something that will raise their value more in the eyes of Joe Q. Public.

The Girl Scouts haven’t been rocked by sexual assault controversies, associated with evangelical religious groups or explicitly discriminated on the basis of religion yet the conventional wisdom is that the BSA is the real scouting org and the GSA is a make-do also-ran. I have a hard time seeing how this is something that it’s reasonable to blame the GSA for not being as good as the BSA, because when you actually look at the two, I think they kind of are better.

47

I’m unsure if you’re trying to rebut my post, but if you are, none of that does.

48

You said that the GSA should change their organization to stay attractive to their members, right? I was trying to say that I think it’s less about how attractive the GSA is to their own members and more about how attractive the BSA is to the general population. If being in the GSA gets you a “Huh, weird.” and being in the BSA gets you a “Wow, that’s cool.”, then I think people will leave the GSA to belong to BSA, even if the GSA offers more and better opportunities for the things they are interested in. And so, I think it’s unfair to throw all the blame on the GSA when I think a large part of it is because we, the public, are uncritically valuing one institution higher than the other without stopping to consider if that valuation is warranted.

49

Sometime back in the 1970s, the BSA either briefly changed its name to “Scouting/USA”, or was seriously considering the idea, but got talked out of it.

I expect the name’s still available.

The way I heard the joke was:

Q. When does a Cub Scout become a Boy Scout?
A. When he eats his first Brownie.

50

I’m sure there are lots of prestigious, difficult awards that your average HR department hasn’t heard of. I’m curious how the numbers break down; personally I know a lot of Eagle Scouts, and 0 Gold Awardees.

I found some great data on Eagle Scout numbers, but nothing this good about Gold Awards. Both organizations claim around a 6% issue rate for “eligible scouts.” I think the word eligible is key here – per Wiki, BSA has 2.8m scouts and GSA has 1.8m – not a huge difference.

But – and I apologize, this is the best cite I could find –

This is only one council in Kansas, which covers twice the area of the local BSA council, yet hands out less than 10% of its highest award to girls compared to the boys, and per the article that year was an outlier. This suggests that the number of girls sticking with GSA in high school, when they’re eligible for the Gold Award, is somewhere between 5 and 10% of the number of boys who stick with the BSA through high school.

That’s not to say one is better than the other, with seemingly equal issue rates, but it seems understandable that one is more well known.

51

Because, for their entire existence, up until now, the basic premise that the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts had was that one was restricted to one gender, and the other to the other (yes, I know about the co-ed programs for older kids). They fundamentally didn’t directly compete against each other for membership.

And, now, the Boy Scouts have decided that their solution to fixing their membership problems is to “steal share” from the Girl Scouts. Both organizations are facing a lot of the same problems, but instead of trying to work together with the Girl Scouts for the benefit of both organizations, the Boy Scouts seem to be willing to try to prosper at the Girl Scouts’ expense.

52

Things change. Are you proposing that things should never change?

Suppose the Catholic Church decided it would allow priests to marry, allow women to be priests and change it’s stance on birth control and abortion. Would you object?

You can’t steal something that doesn’t belong to someone else. Or do you think that the GSA “owns” all the girls in the US?

53

I was listening to NPR this morning and they said that the individual troops could decide if they wanted to be single gender or co-ed. I don’t have a problem with this although I hope they rebrand as just “Scouts” instead of “Boy Scouts”.

54

Apples and oranges. While those sorts of changes would be things that could help increase the RCC’s relevance in North America and Europe, they wouldn’t be specifically done with an eye to recruiting members away from another specific denomination.

Gee, thank you for putting words in my mouth. The BSA and the GSA have effectively had a tacit agreement for over a century: the BSA didn’t recruit girls, and the GSA didn’t recruit boys. Of all the things that the GSA had to worry about regarding keeping their membership numbers up, competition from the BSA wasn’t on the list, until now.

55

Come back when you have a better argument than “things should not change”. Because that’s no argument at all.

And I didn’t put any words in your mouth. You used the word “steal”-- I did not put that in your mouth.

56

I never said “things should not change,” nor did I say (nor think) that the GSA somehow “owns” girls. I simply think that the BSA has decided that it’s OK for them to attempt to survive at the GSA’s expense. Maybe that’s their only option, but it still doesn’t make them look awesome.

57

I am a bit surprised that there is so much support on this board for an organization that openly discriminates against atheists.

58

Well this is the Boy Scout Oath:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

Here is the Scout law:

A Scout is:

Trustworthy,
Loyal,
Helpful,
Friendly,
Courteous,
Kind,
Obedient,
Cheerful,
Thrifty,
Brave,
Clean,
and Reverent.

Ours also says the outdoor creed:
As an American, I will do my best to -

Be clean in my outdoor manners
Be careful with fire
Be considerate in the outdoors, and
Be conservation minded.

The Scout motto is “Be Prepared”.

I don’t get what part of all this would be offensive to an atheist?

59

Seriously?

60

Just to let you know, basically the GS dropped merit badges and switched to this new program called “Journeys”. The idea is girls would explore options that would incorporate things done on merit badges but in reality (ex. outdoors and nature would incorporate canoeing and camping), its a big workbook which girls have found boring and too much like school. BUT the GS spent millions on it so they have to stick with it.

Sad.