Boy Scouts of America Removes the Word ‘Boy’ From its Name
“an object lesson in the incapacity of traditional institutions to withstand progressive takeover”
The left’s takeover of the Boy Scouts is complete. Another institution falls to progressive politics.
From Heather Mac Donald at City Journal:
Girling the Boy Scouts
The Boy Scouts of America has a Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. The organization requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion. It admitted girls to its program for 11- to 17-year-old boys in 2019 and changed the name of that program from the Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA. The word “boy” has been routed from the organization’s promotional materials and replaced with “youth,” as in: “For more than 100 years, Scouting programs have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath.”
Does it matter, then, that the Boy Scouts of America has now extirpated the last use of “boy” found in its entire portfolio—the “boy” in “Boy Scouts of America,” the name of the parent organization? It does. That the Boy Scouts cannot tolerate even an atavistic use of “boy” reveals how powerful the impulse is to efface males from our culture. The transformation of the Boy Scouts of America into Scouting America is an object lesson in the incapacity of traditional institutions to withstand progressive takeover.
The need for an entity that valorizes males, or that merely acknowledges their existence, is greater today than when the Boy Scouts was founded in the early twentieth century. The British war veteran Robert Baden-Powell despaired at the lost boys he saw in London’s slums, seemingly deficient in the Victorian virtues of honesty, hardiness, and self-reliance. Baden-Powell envisioned an organization that would combine boys’ craving for heroism with a code of chivalry, wrapped in the lure of the outdoors. He and his North American counterparts understood masculinity as self-sacrificing and ennobling. Chief Scout Citizen Theodore Roosevelt reminded the American Boy Scouts in 1915 that “manliness in its most rigorous form can be and ought to be accompanied by unselfish consideration for the rights and interests of others.” Baden-Powell wrote that the Scout must ask himself, when forced to choose between two courses of action: “ ‘Which is my duty?’ that is, ‘Which is best for other people?’ ”
The value of an all-boys organization was self-evident to the Boy Scouts’ founders and to the Scout leaders who followed them. Masculine comradeship underlies males’ willingness to undertake military and civic sacrifice.
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Comments
So, “Young Pioneers” it is, huh?
Harris Youth?
The program has been withering for a long time now….
I personally know three former Scout Masters who had to stop because they couldn’t get insurance any more.
I was referred to join a group of boys at GMI (now Kettering U) at 13. It was fantastic. The 3rd year they converted it to a Boy Scout Troup, flooding it with far less motivated kids. They ruined it.
Fortunately for me, I had developed many friendships with GMI staff, and was able to frequently hang out there after school let out. It gave me access to lots of state of the art tech, a high power ruby laser, an early plasma cutter, x-ray intensification, radio isotopes, analog and digital computers, both engineering work stations and a mainframe. A semi conductor fab lab & so much more.
I did not appreciate what Boy Scouts did to our group.
My son earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 2018 – right before the organization went to crap. I wouldn’t let him join today.
Mine got his in 2012, and I have the same sentiment.
Huh. I thought they officially changed their name to “Scouting USA” something like 15 years ago.
I’m surprised they are surviving. Out where I live, it was a real challenge to find a troop that was run by anyone other than a Mormon church. And the Mormons dropped them like a hot potato, all at once, when they started going woke.
What about 4-H?
they are removing actual males from society
so guy was fired from the olympics reporting for saying
women were putting on make-up
wait until they start announcing their new badge system!!!
and how to earn them
So for the DEI badge to scouts have to confess their privilege?
This is sad. As a Boy Scout I learned how to cook, to camp, to save distressed swimmers, to do CPR, and so much more. It’s a great loss to the many it could do good for.
Will they get a pronoun patch now.
Conan O’Brien at his peak did a segment on “Will the Gay Scouts Have to Accept Straight Members?” I never guessed it would come true.
Just let the organization die already and replace it with something better
the BOY scouts like the rotc was a feeder system to the military
we see where this is headed
Everything has a finite life. The scouting movement is dying or dead. The YMCA is now a glorified day care for women; boys and men tossed aside for their needs. Even the USO’s mission is radically different from its original purpose.
Women took over these institutions. Men need to start new organizations of their own and KEEP ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT FUNDING OR “HELP” OUT OF THE PICTURE.
As a current Scout leader, what keeps me giggling is how the organization will eventually abbreviate its name as SA. “The Mormons abandoned us, now the Jews won’t join. We can’t figure out why.”
No longer about males, no take boy out of the name
No longer about woodsmanship as a feeder to military scouts – so remove scouts
No longer for USA , so remove America.
So now the organization’s name?
OF