With a welcome name change, Boy Scouts of America embraces its new reality | Editorial
Nearly a fifth of the group's roughly 1 million members are female. More broadly, the adjectives “boy” and “girl” are not as blithely applied as they were when it was founded more than a century ago.
The recent announcement that Boy Scouts of America will change its name to Scouting America didn’t get as much public reaction as its 2017 decision to include girls in a club that had been all-male since Boer War hero Lord Robert Baden-Powell founded the original organization in England 117 years ago.
The name change doesn’t officially take effect until February 2025 and is merely an acknowledgment of what the Boy Scouts already are: coed. Its roughly one million members now include 176,000 girls, who were able to join the group beginning in 2019. More than a thousand young women have become Eagle Scouts since 2021.
The biggest question now is, when will the Girl Scouts hike down the same path? Resistance may be futile, but that organization continues to make a separate but equal argument eerily similar to some racial exclusivity defenses being made before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
That irony irritates some Girls Scouts leaders, who say their troops began accepting gay members before the Boy Scouts changed its policy in 2013. They also say sexism was one reason Juliette Gordon Low founded their organization in 1912, after hearing Baden-Powell tout his mission to mold boys.
Both scouting organizations have lost millions of members since the 1970s, with the COVID-19 pandemic taking a huge bite out of their numbers in recent years. Now they are trying to reverse that trend despite cultural changes that make it difficult.
No longer are the adjectives boy and girl as blithely applied as they were a century ago when Low and Baden-Powell’s contemporaries believed anatomy also determined a child’s instincts and interests.
“Depending on how it is used, the concept of gender can be illuminating, clarifying, confusing, contradictory, or downright incoherent,” said Merrimack College professor Michael F. Mascolo in an article for Psychology Today. Calling itself Scouting America may help the Boy Scouts avoid some confusion, but the name change has angered conservatives who say it’s yet another capitulation to the feminist movement.
“Men have experienced the destruction of their spaces and the direct consequences are felt in the everyday attack on their inherent masculinity, which liberal women classify as toxic,” said Mary Rooke, a columnist for former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s online newsletter, the Daily Caller.
Rooke’s rancorous rhetoric smells like the same spiel heard too often in a Congress so hampered by political intrigue that it has become rare for it to pass meaningful legislation. Let’s instead praise both scouting organizations for trying to remain relevant in an evolving environment where young people still need help finding their way to maturity.
Classrooms, too, struggle to ensure no student’s education is limited by either intended or unintended biases based on sex, gender, race, skin color, religion, or anything else. There is no magic formula to carry out that goal. It requires vigilance and consistency. But good schools have learned a child’s education isn’t complete without interaction among students who may, in several respects, be different.
Such an education prepares children to become adults who are fully invested in this country’s stated but too often missed goal of community. Our nation once boastfully called itself a “melting pot.” That was never true, nor should it be. Living here shouldn’t mean being melted down into a hot mess where our individual characteristics are indistinguishable.
Instead, let’s be more like a salad, where what each of us brings to the bowl can be appreciated. Both scouting organizations are trying to figure out how to do that. So should this country.