The Boy Scout camp known as Camp Horseshoe in Rising Sun, Maryland, was my summer home for one week when I was 14.
In those days, the Boy Scouts was a boys-only club. It had not yet devolved into an inclusive organization known as Scouting America, where girls join in on hikes, overnight expeditions in the forest, and week long para-military summer camps where Scouts sleep in open log cabin bunks subject to wind and rain and especially cold nights that never seemed to end.
For the record, I hated Camp Horseshoe. I hated the sunburn, the knot-tying classes: square knot, sheet bend, sheepshank, and the intricacies of the clove hitch. Then there were the military drills before dinner and the crowded swimming pool where you couldn’t swim unless you signed up with a buddy. What I liked were the nightly bonfires where we’d dress up as American Indians with war paint and headdresses. Sunday was an off day when all the Catholic boys were packed in the back of a pickup truck – there were so few of us – and driven to the local Catholic Church for Mass. Though there was beauty in this part of the country — the 600-acre facility covered two states, three counties and five townships — I was very happy when it was over.
The Boy Scouts in 2026, however, were gutted and emasculated when the organization changed its name to Scouting America and adopted the woke equity gender policies of the left. Like most institutions in America — especially in the cultural realm — the organization now has a feminine-feminist “aura.”
Sadly, that old Scout oath “Be Prepared,” has been transformed to, “Be Pretty.”
In 2019, the Boy Scouts of America renamed its organization Scouts BSA. This occurred one year after allowing girls to join despite the fact that girls already had a time-honored option: the Girl Scouts. Why were girls given the option to join the boys when they could join the Girl Scouts and sell Girl Scout cookies? Why were boys forced to share their Scouting experience with girls when girls had their own organization?
Girls get two options, boys get one. That’s woke feminism in primal mode.
Perhaps the masterminds behind the change wanted to attract masculine tomboy girls turned off by the “sissy” idea of selling cookies.
But something more sinister was afloat. The change, I think, was related to smoothing out the damage caused by a sexual abuse scandal that exploded in 2023, when it was revealed that some 80,000 former Boy Scouts had filed abuse claims against scoutmasters who allegedly molested them. That scandal — this includes the billions paid to the abused former Scouts — forced the organization into a 2.4 billion-dollar bankruptcy claim that permitted the Scouts to keep operating while the abuse claims were processed.
The Boy Scouts, however, knew as far back as 2020-2021 that it was going to be hit with an abuse-centered tsunami, so they secretly sought bankruptcy protection.
The year 2024 saw many GOP lawmakers slamming the organization’s name change to Scouting America. “Wokeness destroys everything,” these lawmakers stated, while Democratic politicians were silent on the issue (they were still trying to define what a woman is). Shortly after the name change, the Scouts revealed a big gain in membership of about 16,000 new members, many of them girls. It bragged about its national membership at over one million members — thanks to girls who left the Girl Scouts to join the boys.
Go woke, go broke. Go co-ed, don’t go broke.
Back in 2013, the Boy Scouts began accepting gay youths, something that took them many years to do despite the fact that the Scout Oath at that time included a promise to be “morally straight,” which really had nothing to do with sexual orientation but with an individual’s moral character apart from sex.
It’s good to recall that in 2013, the gay movement was only incidentally about transgender individuals. Nobody, especially the Boy Scouts, imagined that one day the transgender craze would come to dominate the gay movement.
Before making a decision to admit transgender youths in 2017, in 2015 the organization accepted gay men as troop leaders. On the face of it, this seems fair even though we don’t know what kind of men with secret sexual propensities applied for the job. Were they pedophiles posing as gay men? It’s a certainty that con artists slipped through the cracks because since that time more than 7800 of those former adult leaders were cited in sexual abuse claims.
In 2012, the New York Times reported, “Officials with the Boy Scouts fought in the courts for years to prevent the release of the documents — more than 15,000 pages detailing accusations of sexual abuse against 1,247 scout leaders between 1965 and 1985, with thousands of victims involved, perhaps many thousands…”
Finally, in 2017, the Scouts — no doubt influenced by the strides the transgender movement had made within the gay movement as well as in society at large — capitulated to the times and allowed transgender boys to join the organization. Gone was the old policy that only permitted boys to join the Scouts who were listed as male on their birth certificate.
While the inclusion of girls seemed to save Scouting America’s financial problems, behind the scenes, there were no reports on how girls actually fared on camping expeditions, hiking in the woods, or on multi-night campouts like at Camp Horseshoe. And what about private girl things like menstruation during jamborees and on long walks with boys in the forest. Do girls ‘take it on the chin’ when they have to sleep in those open air log cabin bunks mentioned earlier in this article? (The “fake” girl Boy Scouts I presume, probably have closed air bunks.)
Consider also unit cohesion with many girls lagging behind boys on long hikes. And what about the occasional adolescent romance that might cause a rupture in the group?
Usually it’s the feminine influence in co-ed organizations once exclusively male that come to dominate and rule. Boys with other boys are economical and straight up; getting dressed in an instant (no make up to apply), a quick pee in the woods (can girls do that?), and putting up and taking down tents in record time without being sidetracked with conventional girly things.
(Unless, of course, the girls involved are young butch lesbians.)
For a New York second it looked like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would save the Boy Scouts when he announced that Scouting America will require its members to use their “biological sex at birth and not gender identity." Hegseth then went on to explain that applications will list only options for male and female and the one checked must match the applicant's birth certificate. Youths of opposite genders assigned at birth cannot share bathrooms, tents or other similar spaces, he added.
(All this unnecessary work of keeping the sexes separate after you’ve admitted them into the organization!)
Prior to Hegseth’s post, the Pentagon claimed that Scouting had “lost its way” and called the organization's DEI efforts "unacceptable."
Yet despite Hegseth’s plan to “de-woke” Scouting America, we have the LGBT Advocate reporting that,
“Scouting America pushed back on claims by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the organization would limit membership based solely on sex assigned at birth, insisting that transgender youth remain welcome in its programs.
“The statement contradicts Hegseth’s claims that the organization is rolling back participation rules amid the Trump administration’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across federal agencies.
“In a memo to members, Scouting America President and CEO, Roger Krone wrote that, ‘Scouting America will continue to welcome and serve all youth. That commitment is unwavering.’”
If this is true, then Scouting America is treating Hegseth and the Defense Department’s reform of Scouting America as a joke. Halfway measures rarely work but tend to create confusion.
A real reform — one that must take place — would reinstate the original name, the Boy Scouts of America, and send the girls back to the Girl Scouts to sell their cookies.
