Fun fact: from 2010 until 2012, Rex Tillerson, former Eagle Scout, was the national president of the BSA. This was while he was juggling that with running Exxon. After his term as president ended, he remained on the Executive Council, and apparently helped sway the organization to let gay kids join/stay in.
Another fun fact: as President of the United States, Donald Trump, like all US presidents, is the Honorary President of the Boy Scouts.
To be fair to the BSA, they invite every president to speak at the Jamboree. And I don’t think they ask the president for his speech ahead of time. Never had to before now.
Additionally, the BSA has become way more progressive in the last few years, allowing both gay and transgendered scouts in. Now little girls can get their wilderness survival merit badges, and that is pretty cool.
I think that I would be a drastically different person if I wasn’t part of the Boy Scouts. My personal experiences were great, and I am even more proud than ever to be an Eagle Scout today.
This is so quaint on the Internet! Bless your heart.
They did come out the next day and say it was inappropriate.
Anyway, on the way home last night I heard a local scout leader discuss this and he said that the dens and packs will have the option to be boy, girl or mixed, at least as they are looking at it now. Interestingly he never mentioned troops.
And I had no idea Explorer Scouts had been co-ed since it’s inception.
Yeah, explorers was always the coed scouts, but they couldn’t get Eagle Scout status.
Boy scouts won’t allow girls until 2019. Cub scouts can go now. Troops will be coed, and dens will be up to the leaders discretion. I think dens being segregated would make sense. They are pretty small groups, like 5-10 kids. Usually all friends from the same grade or even class in school. Dens are the small groups, and the Troop is the whole city wide (in small towns) organization.
Women were already allowed to be involved in leadership roles, but not as scouts. This transition makes sense. One of my scout leaders was a woman, a parent of 2 of the kids in the troop.
Maybe you’re missing how you deal with fascism.
It’s not by letting them commit genocide and then start to do something about it.
Yea, he said women had been scoutmasters since the 80’s I think. I don’t have any problem with this and as an ex-scout I want to see the scouts succeed, not disappear.
Agreed on fascism. I was talking about something else, which was that I didn’t think the association of scouts to Hitler youth made sense, but it is just my opinion.
That’s fair, though they very much took their time with a half-assed apology that Trump co-opted them into Trump Youths.
When I was in Boy Scouts in the 90s, my scout master was one of the moms.
Yeah, I didn’t hear the speech but I can just imagine the awfulness.
I think this is a non-evil development. There’s a name change and they are letting girls in the Scouts.
The actual girl scouts are furious, not just about the name change but poaching girls that want a scout experience. Not sure why the girl scouts don’t just do the same thing? Does the boy scout organization have some cachet the girl scouts do not?
The neé Boy Scouts experience featured more “roughing it,” and the top rank of Eagle Scout held some international acclaim. Depending on the local troop’s discipline and considering the amount of pre-teen to teenage male dipshits present, there may have been a certain quantity of grabassery the Girl Scouts simply couldn’t match.
When I visited my little sister at her girl scout camp back in the day, I was astonished to see that their restrooms had electric hair driers built into the walls. A few female friends at the time also complained to me that girl scouts never did “fun stuff” or “cool stuff” like boy scouts did.
The Girl Scouts have a (largely) working business model. Their membership has remained fairly static while the Boy Scouts’ participation rates have been falling. The GS also have a massively-successful fundraising plan (cookies) that they say provides for more and better activities for the girls.
So they figure they’re not the ones that really need to change. In the GSA’s mind, the BSA need to figure out how to change to attract more boys rather than poaching girls.
These are voluntary programs, so I’m not sure if there’s any actual poaching going on. A lot of this depends on how each troop is run. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible for a girl scout troop to do more camping than a boy scout troop if the girl scout leadership wanted to.
As far as girl scout cookies and boy scout popcorn go, I used to like both but have recently soured on both. They’re both expensive and unhealthy, and my tastes must have changed because neither is all that tasty to me either.
Aren’t the boy scouts still the larger organization? Why get a new girl scouts troop when you can just add to the existing ones. I would be worried that the girls might not be treated fairly or treat as seriously, but ideally, it would be nice if the two orgnaization just came together and figure out a nice way to support pretty much all kids. Dream world. I know.
I really doubt the Boy Scouts poaching a few girls from the GSA will effect either group in any major way. I can’t see it being that big a number.
Mormon support will be dropping.
The Mormon church and the Boy Scouts of America have announced that they are ending their relationship, after more than 100 years of close ties.
In a joint statement, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Boy Scouts said that as the church’s membership is increasingly living outside the United States, it “felt the need to create and implement a uniform youth leadership and development program that serves its members globally. In so doing, it will be necessary for the Church to discontinue its role as a chartered partner.”
The church said its new youth development program for both girls and boys will begin in 2020. Until then, “the intention of the Church is to remain a fully engaged partner in Scouting for boys and young men ages 8-13 and encourages all youth, families, and leaders to continue their active participation and financial support.”
The move is important because Mormons make up a major part of the Boy Scouts membership. The church has been the single biggest sponsor of Boy Scout troops in the U.S. The Associated Press reports that “Mormon boys who will be leaving represent about 18.5 percent of the 2.3 million youth in the organization.”
I wonder if their headquarters will be called the Nauvoo. /s