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A major shift from the Boy Scouts of America:
Irving, Texas – October 11, 2017 – Today, the Boy Scouts of America Board of Directors unanimously approved to welcome girls into its iconic Cub Scout program and to deliver a Scouting program for older girls that will enable them to advance and earn the highest rank of Eagle Scout. The historic decision comes after years of receiving requests from families and girls, the organization evaluated the results of numerous research efforts, gaining input from current members and leaders, as well as parents and girls who've never been involved in Scouting – to understand how to offer families an important additional choice in meeting the character development needs of all their children.
"This decision is true to the BSA's mission and core values outlined in the Scout Oath and Law. The values of Scouting – trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind, brave and reverent, for example – are important for both young men and women," said Michael Surbaugh, the BSA's Chief Scout Executive. "We believe it is critical to evolve how our programs meet the needs of families interested in positive and lifelong experiences for their children. We strive to bring what our organization does best – developing character and leadership for young people – to as many families and youth as possible as we help shape the next generation of leaders."
[...] Starting in the 2018 program year, families can choose to sign up their sons and daughters for Cub Scouts. Existing packs may choose to establish a new girl pack, establish a pack that consists of girl dens and boy dens or remain an all-boy pack. Cub Scout dens will be single-gender — all boys or all girls. Using the same curriculum as the Boy Scouts program, the organization will also deliver a program for older girls, which will be announced in 2018 and projected to be available in 2019, that will enable them to earn the Eagle Scout rank. This unique approach allows the organization to maintain the integrity of the single gender model while also meeting the needs of today's families.
I'll admit it, I was a little surprised by the announcement. As a longtime member of the BSA and an Eagle Scout, I find this extremely interesting. I know some who are dead set against it, and others who are totally for it. My personal opinion is that it will be a good thing, both for the BSA and for the young men and women who become part of the organization.
The biggest loser in all of this will probably be the Girl Scouts. I can see their membership numbers dwindling rapidly if/when this takes off.
As a side note, Scouting has been co-ed in many countries for decades.
Both the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts have seen decreasing membership in recent years, and both have been trying to find ways to increase their membership. In this context, they now seem to be butting heads:
The Boy Scouts will soon include girls, and not everyone's happy about it.
The 107-year-old organization announced Wednesday that younger girls will be allowed to join Cub Scouts and that older girls will be eligible to earn the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout.
[...] For months, Girl Scouts USA had a notion BSA would try to start recruiting girls. In August, Buzzfeed News obtained a strongly worded letter in which GSUSA President Kathy Hopinkah Hannan accused the BSA of courting girls to boost falling enrollment numbers.
From the letter:
We are confused as to why, rather than working to appeal to the 90 percent of boys who are not involved in BSA programs, you would choose to target girls.
What are your thoughts? Were you ever a boy scout, or a girl scout, or did they ever affect you in any way? And do you think the BSA should be praised for opening their doors to girls or should they be castigated for 'targeting' girls who would be better off staying with their own kind?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 13 2017, @01:10AM (9 children)
Really, it'd be a pretty good time for a merger. The BSA have better numbers but the GSA is way, way better at marketing. I mean, come on, popcorn vs. thin mints?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @03:10AM (8 children)
The boy scouts camp out in the wildnerness, surrounded by wildlife and trees.
The girl scouts camp out at entrances to grocery stores, surrounded by boxes of cookies.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday October 13 2017, @08:12AM (1 child)
That at least addresses the issue of wild, raging hormones :)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday October 13 2017, @02:10PM
Please no! It's better to acknowledge that wild raging hormones do not exist. Ignore the problem long enough and it will go away.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday October 13 2017, @10:11AM
Girl scouts ftw!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 13 2017, @12:57PM (4 children)
Thats funny because its true, but I was a scout as a kid and my kids have been scouts and the difference are WAY deeper.
Like it or not, just like there's fundamental biological differences in bodies and races there's differences in brains and hormones.
So naturally cub scouts focused on boys has them mix running around and hands on, and play and hobby interests are slightly aggressive. Girl scouts is mostly girls holding hands and talking about their feelings and art projects and singing friendship songs to each other. No shitposting. Seriously. Seen it. Different strokes for different folks. The girl scouts are likely to use crayons to color a picture of a deer and talk about their feelings about the movie Bambi and sing their favorite disney song from the movie and the boys are extremely likely to hang the same picture up and shoot target practice arrows at it to get an archery belt loop (kids) or merit badge (teen boys). Boys and Girls are different, you see. Just like races and cultures and religions and cuisines. Biological level, mental level, all the way. Either you're scientific and red pilled to human biological differences or its Lysenkoism politics overrides scientific fact blue pills.
Now the boy scout environment is not friendly or designed for the estrogen component of humanity so it must be changed and destroyed to fit them because they are higher priority than fucking white males, which will drive away the last of the boys in favor of theoretical girls who won't come anyway, resulting in the immolation of the entire system. It seems VERY foolish.
Weirdly in practice not a hell of a lot is changing. When I was a kid and when I was treasurer of my son's pack, scout families tend to be bigger and its INCREDIBLY common for sisters to be at the pack meetings. And, well, we're putting band aids on for first aid class or we're visiting the fire station or we're doing family camping in the group campground at the local county park or whatever, and it seems stupid to exclude the moms and sisters, so they come along ... But the meeting and plans were all about the boys and girls were allowed/tolerated, not prioritized above the needs of the boys, as will happen now.
This is actually a fascinating analogy for right wing / alt-right politics. In scouting we had an org of, by, and for the boys, but that doesn't mean we put the moms and sisters in ovens or brought Zyklon B to meetings or campouts. In fact we did the western civilization tradition of treating our visiting guest very well, to the point of luxury. There's only one cabin? Thats for the moms and sisters. There's only one outhouse, thats for the girls you guys shit in the woods. Extra food for seconds? Ladies first. But nice as we were, the org was always of, by, and for the boys. Despite left wing propaganda and talking points, that's how real right wingers think and act around outside or minority groups. You're welcome in our house, just don't forget, its our house. Most of us have very little interest in building camps and ovens, that would definitely be a last resort. A "white supremacist" takeover of the country would look a hell of a lot more like a 00s era boy scout camp than the 40s german final solution camps. Mostly because we're mostly scouts and ex-mil Americans not 40s Germans. Different cultures and all that.
Also the BSA organization has more than cub scouts and boy scouts. They have venturing which is literally older boy scouts that allows girls. Venturing is screwed by this decision. I don't really understand the point. If girls wanted to do "boy scout" stuff they could have joined the boy scouts of america inc's venturing program last week. Now they have to decide between venturing and boy scouting and the difference is ... I donno.
Overall I think this is pretty bad news for the legacy organizations. If my kids were a little younger I guess I'd be doing the Trail Life and Heritage Girls stuff, which is basically less pozz'd boy scouts and girl scouts, think of them like scouting from the "old days" like the turn of this century and you'd be mostly correct. I don't understand why the local scouting org has a catholic church as a sponsor, the church is going to kick scouting out in favor of TL and AHG pretty soon as has already happened across the country. So its hard to guess if scouting will die because of lack of kids / excess of liberal parental destructive virtue signalling or if the sponsor orgs will say enough is enough and kick them out leaving the packs and troops with no sponsor.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @01:35PM (1 child)
My daughter loved tagging along to cub scouts with my son. They learned to make fires, carve things, use a pocketknife, make birdhouses, first aid, build and race wooden cars, tie knots, and had epic games of tag and tug of war.
In Girl Scouts they colored, did workbooks, sold a shitton of cookies, and went to a jamboree once per year.
I participated in both with my children, and the former was more fun for me. The girl scout meetings felt like schoolwork, honestly.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 13 2017, @02:52PM
Confirmed. Four minor extensions:
AC's probably a rare SN female because our council didn't allow male participation other than very strictly isolated events. My wife did volunteer as a leader. Reportedly most of the female GS leaders spend most of their time doing cat fights with the other alpha females. Strangely enough the alpha males in scout leadership got along great, probably because we were over half ex-mil and that teaches you to work for a common goal or maybe its just another human biological difference between the sexes, or whatever. I just thought it was funny that the leadership men in boy scouts all become friends but the leadership in GS are like an adult parody of "mean girls" movie and they all hate each other. If my hypothesis is correct about ACs female-ness, therefore AC was probably in GS leadership which only permits women, then it would be interesting to confirm or deny the GS female leaders were catty and/or cattier than the general population.
I'd subjectively add that everything seemed more expensive for the girls but they seemed to raise more money selling cookies, which I thought was weird. So you sold 4x as much dollar value cookies as my son sold popcorn, but his boy scout two nights overnight swim test/camp is merely $20 donation toward food (teen boys can certainly eat $20 of food over two days especially out camping, so thats totally fair...) yet your four hour girl scout afternoon swim party at the council site is $75, something seems off here... There's a lot of money in GS and its not going to the girls but lots of it is obviously going somewhere. There's less money in BS and every penny, plus some, seems to go to the boys.
There were a lot of girl and parent entries in the pinewood derby some of which were pretty funny. The hello kitty car was extremely popular among the girls. The "buy girl scout cookies" advertising car with a real cookie tie strapped to the car. The "Frozen" movie theme car shaped like a sandal.
I'm convinced "be prepared" as a BS thing isn't so much to prepare for life, although that's nice, but because scoutmasters were tired of kids showing up forgetting stuff. GS show up unprepared all the time. She wore high heels to a couple mile nature hike? And some other girl wore flip flops? WTF? There's "BS screwed up" level which is still less messed up than "GS operating nominally" level and "GS screwed up" is like now we need SAR support, every freaking time. The medieval trope of maidens needing rescuing, its not just lazy novel writers, I think its like female genetic to lure in husbands or something. This ... trait or whatever... might be an interesting issue with "forcing" girls into boy scouts aside from the obvious stuff like sex parties in the tents and skinny dipping and stuff like that. You're going to have girls show up with only one hiking boot or forgot their hair curler or wtf at camp.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday October 13 2017, @03:02PM (1 child)
A shit ton of the politics you're talking are direct responses to the over-aggressive pseudo-scientific assertions you're trying to make here about gender differences.
Let's start with the obvious: there's no biological reason for girl shit to be pink. Hell, pink used to be a boy's color.
What's next? There's no biological reason that boys shouldn't grow up with parenting toys like baby dolls. It's more important for girls, sure, but mainly because boys are so freaked out by the sheer unknown of parenthood they take the opportunity to run away. And plenty of men turn out to be incredibly invested in their families.
We can discuss tons of differences that are primarily hormonal in nature. But guess what: we can change a person's hormones quite easily. So the difference in upper body strength that leads to so many loosely justified cultural differences, well that's biological but it isn't an imperative.
In much the same way, the many ways we treat women differently because women bear children are not an imperative. Women can be naturally infertile, and they can very easily be on birth control. And just like with men, there will always be perfectly fertile individuals who just don't ever want children.
And while you can make generalizations about men and women as groups, you will always find a man and a woman such that the woman is stronger, the man is more emotional, the woman is more aggressive, the man is more family-oriented, the woman is more analytical, the man is more neurotic, the woman is more crude, the man is more gentle. There is no difference between men and women such that every single man stands on one side of the line and every single woman stands on the other.
I will readily admit that there are real biological differences between men and women. Some of them are even unchangeable. But none of them are a hard black/white distinction between men and women. And the cultural constructs built up around these differences have gotten pretty weird.
Guess whose rights the feminist is fighting for. It's foremost the women whose desires and personality are closer to those of men (there are lots of them). And if you are talking to the right feminist, it's also the men whose desires and personality are closer to those of women (there are lots of them too).
And why is it a fight? Why does it have to be a huge movement to gain any ground? Because assholes like you keep drawing lines in the sand, declaring that X is for women only and Y is for men only, no exceptions. You like to pretend it's "tradition", even when it was invented in the 20th century by advertisers trying to manipulate us into spending more money. And when people inevitably find themselves forced to the other side of your stupid lines than where they would be naturally, they are forced to wonder what's wrong with them.
But you know what one thing is a biological imperative about all humans? That separation is not equal. It would be nice if we could have separate systems for naturally different groups of people. But whenever that happens, one group always gets to be the boss. And we don't trust in your magnanimity. Because let's face it: the "cultural differences" between "mostly scounts and ex-mil Americans" and "40s Germans" are much narrower than you think. Especially when your underclasses refuse to cow themselves to your self-professed superiority.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday October 14 2017, @04:00PM
OK a distractor of talking about clothes colors. Whatever.
"shouldn't grow up with" has little to do with "have little interest in unless forced by parents proud to post on social media about it"
"we can change" Mutilation of a successful system is always possible. We could chop off everyone's left hand, in theory. Doesn't sound like a very good idea. What is the advantage of replacing a proven working system with a system of unnatural alienation?
Then we have the individual vs group statistical fallacy where over lapping bell curves somehow mathematically proves the curves are perfectly identical and there is no difference and the area underneath has to be treated as equal if there's any overlap. As if it matters or somehow proves ... anything. As if having no overlap, in theory, would somehow prove anything. Its a strange mental meme attractor that accomplishes nothing but is always quoted in these discussions.
"keep drawing lines in the sand" Life is borders. Since the first cell wall evolved billions of years ago.
"And when people inevitably find themselves forced to the other side of your stupid lines than where they would be naturally, they are forced to wonder what's wrong with them." As if that's a problem. Again the handicapped analogy. If there's one car accident victim without a left hand, we must all have our left hands chopped off to be "equal". Or we must spend all day praising each other for ever more eloquent explanations of why there's no difference between people or their abilities with or without left hands and only haters would notice the empty sleeve "in the current year we are all left-hand-less"
Its a replacement for a demand, a human right, of empathy and tolerance, with a demand for lies about equality.
"But whenever that happens, one group always gets to be the boss." Actually, no. A lot of people mistakenly think boy scouts and girl scouts are related or under the same corporate umbrella but they're quite separate with no superiority issues. Under 'normal' conditions, not during war time, most countries with borders mostly have sovereignty, thats kind of the point. My house is separate but equal to my neighbors house. For almost all of human history most of humanity has not lived under a world wide empire and it would be very unusual for, say, an Aztec warrior to live inferior or beneath a roman senator. Its actually the other way around, separation almost never results in hierarchy, in fact its so unusual of a human experience that we blow lots of labor on literature and history narrative when hierarchy does unusually appear.
"Especially when your underclasses refuse to cow themselves to your self-professed superiority." That is essentially the modern right wing or alt-right in a nutshell. A rampage of cultural racism and sexism against white males and western civilization that its universally inferior and to be hated and genocided and that is the only permissible public opinion, and "naah, I don't think so" as the response. I think you were trying to talk about non-whites or women or leftists or something, but they're the dominant violent culture at this time.