Heather Mac Donald Girling the Boy Scouts Progressives notch another victory in their war on American institutions.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/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. Boys compete with one another, torment one another, but also sometimes elevate one another. They seek adult males to emulate—ideally their fathers but, in the absence of their own father, a father figure embodying masculine virtue. That father figure can even be imaginary; boys’ aspirations are fired by tales of male courage and the accomplishment of great feats.
Today, American boys are plagued by fatherlessness, both real and symbolic. Whereas in the early twentieth century, boys lost their biological fathers to industrial accidents and tuberculosis, now they lose them to parental irresponsibility. In 2022, 40 percent of all American children were born to single mothers. Black newborns faced a catastrophic 69.3 percent illegitimacy rate, while more than 53 percent of Hispanic children were born to unmarried females. Whites had a 27 percent illegitimacy rate; the rate among the white underclass is twice that. Already in 2016, 59 percent of births to white women who did not finish high school or obtain a GED occurred outside of marriage. Boys suffer the most in the typical fatherless household, with its lack of structure, parade of shiftless boyfriends, and inconsistent discipline. (There are exceptions to this chaos, of course.)
The disintegration of the family coincided with the devalorization of males, making the possibility of even a symbolic father figure remote. Feminism was zero-sum: it championed females by tearing males down. The concept of toxic masculinity was active decades before the American Psychological Association declared traditional masculinity (which the APA defined by such civilization-creating traits as competitiveness, stoicism, and the desire to provide for others) a malady. Positive male characters in television and movies were replaced by dolts and abusers. And a cascade of female-uplift programs started pouring out of the government, foundations, corporations, and universities.
Any high-status, high-paying endeavor where males still predominate has been targeted for antimale intervention. The bulk of attention focuses on the STEM fields. One would have difficulty finding a large philanthropy or school system today lacking a Girls Who Code–type initiative. The Break Through Tech AI Program, sponsored by MIT, UCLA, and Cornell Tech, is typical. It is targeted at black and Hispanic female computing students, who benefit from an 82 percent placement rate in paid internships with such prestige companies as Accenture, Amazon, and Google. That boys even know about STEM fields today reflects their innate drive for knowledge and discovery, since the entire society goes mum if a young male might otherwise overhear any encouragement to pursue a science career.
Matching the flood of female-preferring programs in STEM is the flood of female-serving programs in health. The Affordable Care Act codified eight offices of women’s health throughout the executive branch; it created a host of women-only benefits (like annual “well-woman” visits). What did men get? Higher insurance premiums. The Department of Health and Human Services has an Office on Women’s Health; the Centers for Disease Control has an Office of Women’s Health; the Health Resources and Services Administration has a Women’s Preventive Services Initiative; women’s health analysts are seeded throughout the ten regional federal health offices. The government’s Healthy People 2030 initiative set 29 health targets for women and four for men. Requests by men’s advocates for an Office on Men’s Health in HHS have fallen on deaf ears.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden created a Gender Policy Council with a focus on “gender equity and equality”—i.e., on creating preferences for females in every walk of life. Despite the superabundance of existing female health initiatives, the Gender Policy Council rolled out a new White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research earlier this year. It was time, declared the March 2024 executive order announcing the push, to “fundamentally change how we approach and fund women’s health research in the United States.” A crazy optimist might think that the only possible “change of approach” would be to rebalance the funding between men’s and women’s health research and care, since it’s hard to imagine that one could stuff any more resources into existing pro-female disparities. But that’s exactly what the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research did. It has been “galvanizing the Federal Government to advance women’s health, including through investments in innovation and improved coordination within and across agencies,” according to the March executive order. We are to pretend that the federal government has never before been so “galvanized.” (We play a similar game of “let’s pretend” whenever a college unveils its latest diversity project.)
The policy of the Biden Administration is to “close health disparities,” according to the March executive order. An innocent reader might think that what is meant here is actual health disparities—the ones that lethally afflict males. Women lived nearly six years longer than men in 2021; at the turn of the twentieth century, the life expectancy gap was two years, though job-related fatalities were much higher in 1900 than today. Men die of cancer at a rate of 189.5 per 100,000, compared with 135.7 cancer deaths per 100,000 women, yet only research to beat breast cancer gets celebrity treatment. Men die of diabetes at a 60 percent higher rate than females. Men’s age-adjusted Covid death rate was also 60 percent higher than the female age-adjusted Covid death rate, even after considering preexisting conditions. For every 100 females who die of opioid overdose, 227 males die of the same cause. Men kill themselves at nearly four times the rate of females, and the male rate is rising, due to an increase in suicides among the 15–34 age cohort. Workplace mortality is ten times higher for males.
Those real health disparities are of no interest to the Gender Policy Council. One might even suspect that, if confronted with the facts of higher male mortality, the feminist Left, in a candid moment, would respond: good riddance. Males have also fallen behind in education and social functioning. On a per-capita basis, females outpace males in college enrollment and attainment of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Males outpace females in drug and alcohol abuse, in getting suspended and expelled from school, and in diagnoses of learning disabilities and communication disorders. Males are 13 times likelier than females to be in state or federal prison.
A racial disparity shows up in incarceration as well: black males are incarcerated at four times the rate of white males. That disparity has prompted a decades-long effort to eliminate the purported racial bias in the criminal-justice system. The sex disparity in incarceration rates is 300 percent higher than the racial disparity, yet no one objects or claims that the criminal-justice system is biased against males. People are happy to lock up males qua males—white males, that is, not black males—and to throw away the key.
Men, in short, are in a parlous state. If only there were an organization to encourage boys to strive for goodness, self-mastery, and excellence! Oh, wait: such an institution already exists—or did, until it was dismantled. The eradication of the Boy Scouts began in the early 1970s, with the inevitable, and inevitably mortal, push for “relevance.” Woodcraft skills were replaced by tips for surviving ghetto rat bites and overcoming drug abuse. Scoutmasters became “personal growth” counselors. The Boy Scouts of America rebranded itself Scouting/USA, adumbrating the recent name change. (See “Why the Boy Scouts Work,” Winter 2000.)
A course correction, however, followed that first round of self-effacement. At the end of the 1970s, the Boy Scouts of America exhumed its original name and restored camping and other outdoor activities to the program’s core. But the writing was on the wall. The Boy Scouts of America was too wholesome, too patriotic, and, above all, too male. Fortunately for the Left, the Boy Scouts possessed a fatal vulnerability: it could be accused of being insufficiently “inclusive.” Females, openly gay would-be scoutmasters, and gay scouts—or, rather, the advocacy organizations claiming to represent those groups—started suing the organization for its failures of “inclusivity.” Corporations stopped funding inner-city scouting, under pressure from their employees, who objected to the Scouts’ ban on openly gay scoutmasters. Never mind that the Boy Scouts is a lifeline out of ghetto pathologies for young black males, few of whom have the slightest idea about the Scouts’ position on gay scoutmasters and most of whom are a thousand times needier than any corporate employee or human-resources functionary. The Scouts would ultimately have to set aside $2.46 billion in legal damages for homosexual child abuse. But progressive thinking demanded denial of any connection between gay scoutmasters and the abuse of boys.
So the Boy Scouts dropped its ban on openly gay scoutmasters. Trans Scouts (biological females claiming to be males) came in next. The biggest goal, however, was to eradicate the Scouts’ male identity once and for all. In the contemporary world, males are allowed almost no male-exclusive associations, apart from exceptional circumstances, such as being a black male organization. In May 2024, President Biden gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, whose motto is “Become a man of Morehouse.” Biden used the phrases “Morehouse man” and “Morehouse men” more than half a dozen times, in such positive formulations as: “You are Morehouse men. God love you,” and “ ‘The prayers of a righteous man availeth much.’ A righteous man. A good man. A Morehouse man.” It is inconceivable that Biden would heap such praise on manliness if the context were not black. (When Biden turned his eyes from Morehouse College and toward America at large, he saw a country that wantonly kills blacks and denies them democratic rights.)
Females are allowed to maintain separate social clubs, separate colleges, separate educational programs, separate networking groups, separate scholarships. Males are forbidden such things. (Fraternities are the one remaining exception. Perhaps the double standard of banning fraternities while preserving sororities would be too egregious even for the Left to paper over. Perhaps fraternity networks are more powerful than Scout networks and more willing to fight.) Females have been injected into military combat units, the ultimate male-bonding group, for reasons having nothing to do with improving the military’s battle readiness and everything to do with qualifying females for top military brass positions. The boys’ choir, a sublime entity, with a timbre unlike anything on earth, is on the way to extinction. The boys’ choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, has gone co-ed; the King’s College boys’ choir will not be far behind. American feminists could not keep their hands off the all-male Vienna Philharmonic, whose unique sound represented a storied history of self-governance. The National Organization for Women, most of whose members have never attended a Vienna Philharmonic concert and could not distinguish Bach from Brahms, staged protests every time the orchestra played in Carnegie Hall. The New York Times covered those protests lovingly, validating the idea that American activists have a right to dictate to an Austrian orchestra how it should constitute itself. The heat paid off.
The Boy Scouts had its own Greta Thunberg. Teenager Sydney Ireland carried on a media-savvy national campaign complaining that the Scouts were discriminating against her. The local troop in her area had let her participate in their activities, but she was not able officially to earn merit badges and progress up the Boy Scout ranks. The Girl Scouts were not an adequate substitute, she maintained, because they did not offer Eagle Scout status. Ireland could have focused her activism on the Girl Scouts to bring them up to Boy Scout standards. She and her allies could have founded a new organization that offered the same alleged professional benefits as the Boy Scouts. But tearing down or piggybacking on someone else’s efforts is much easier than creating.
By the 2010s, resisting the cultural Left had become all but impossible for mainstream organizations. Thus, in 2018, the Boy Scouts of America renounced its mission of developing selfless, self-reliant men, a calling that required acknowledging the specific character of male identity and the benefits of giving boys a male-specific association and code of honor. The group started admitting girls into its core Boy Scout program for teenagers and renamed it Scouts BSA. The umbrella organization’s name, the Boy Scouts of America, was nevertheless untouchable, we were to believe.
The then Chief Scout Executive claimed, dubiously, that the deliberations on the Scouts BSA rebranding were “incredibly fun.” “We wanted to land on something that evokes the past but also conveys the inclusive nature of the program going forward,” Mike Surbaugh told the Associated Press. “We’re trying to find the right way to say we’re here for both young men and young women.”
Inclusive” is the twenty-first-century version of “relevance.” Once an institution adopts either term as its guiding principle, it’s over. Within short order, the Boy Scouts of America had hired its first Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion and had incorporated the rest of diversity ideology.
Employee “affinity groups”? Check. The concept of “affinity groups” comes from woke corporations and academia; it presumes that allegedly “marginalized” individuals will face exclusion and harassment unless they can cluster together. So Asian Pacific Boy Scout employees can shelter in the APACk affinity group; LGBTQ+ employees can shelter in BSA View; Latinos can shelter in LISTOS; females can shelter in RISE; and blacks can shelter in The Village. Without affinity groups, the “diverse” employees of the Boy Scouts of America will lack a “sense of belonging,” in the words of Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Elizabeth Ramirez-Washka. Heterosexual white males get no affinity groups because they are the oppressors, even in the Boy Scouts.
The concept of “allyship”? Check. “Allyship” arose in academia. Even if the marginalized have an affinity group, they still may risk extinction unless they have “allies” from the majority oppressor group to speak up for them. “Allies” of the Boy Scouts’ marginalized employees are encouraged to join those employees’ affinity groups, in order to provide critical mass against the non-allied white male heterosexual majority.
DEI training? Check. Ten thousand Boy Scout employees and volunteers have completed training to “advance [their] understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Preferential hiring quotas? Check. The BSA has special programs for boosting the recruitment and retention of “diverse employees,” so that the organization may more “accurately reflect the communities” that it serves.
Specializations in “diversity”? Check. Since July 2022, every contender for Eagle Scout rank has had to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion. The deceptively named “Citizenship in Society” badge is a “journey of self-discovery” that teaches Scouts about their own “diverse identities”—in other words, that teaches Scouts to think of themselves and others in terms of race, sex, and sexual identity. Like so much involving diversity, the DEI merit badge is self-referential. Its purpose is to “learn how to encourage an inclusive and welcoming culture in Scouting.”
The rhetoric of “safetyism”? Check. Another academic export, safetyism assumes that ideas challenging current cultural orthodoxies around race and sexuality put “marginalized individuals” at risk. The solution is to create alleged “safe spaces” that can offer support should a marginalized individual suffer anxiety after hearing someone maintain, say, that sex is biological. A 15-year-old female Scout who had participated in the pilot program for the “Citizenship in Society” badge says that it “felt like a safe environment to be open and honest about these topics”—that is, about race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender fluidity. The Scouts’ publicity materials insist that the “BSA is committed to creating a welcoming, safe environment where Scouts can freely express themselves.”
Obsession with “sexual orientation”? Check. Current promotional materials stress that Scouting welcomes all eligible youth, regardless of “orientation,” that no youth may be removed “on the basis of his or her orientation,” and that local troops may select adult leaders “without regard to sexual orientation.”
The DEI apparatus is the antithesis of the original Scouting ethic. Scouts are supposed to focus outward, not on themselves, and especially not on au courant diversity characteristics. They are supposed to be dedicated to universal ideals, not to identitarian commitments. They are supposed to be honest, which means not pretending that, without affinity groups and “allyship,” the Boy Scouts of America would be a cauldron of exclusion and contempt. They are supposed to be color-blind, not exquisitely attuned to racial identity. They are supposed to be patriotic, not predisposed to think that the Scouts and America itself struggle to make every person “feel respected and valued,” in the words of the Scouts’ DEI mission statement. They are supposed to be volunteer-driven, not encumbered by superfluous bureaucracy. It would have astonished Baden-Powell and his North American comrades to learn that Eagle Scouts were spending time with the minutiae of progressive identity politics, rather than learning about nature and self-discipline.
The Scouts’ National Executive Board contains CEOs of red-state companies that produce petroleum, pipelines, livestock, and canned food. (It also contains its fair share of lawyers, management consultants, and HR officers.) The board remains heavily male. Those red-state members might, in theory, have provided some ballast against academically driven identity cults. Yet, in May 2024, this board discarded the last symbolic remnant of traditional Scout identity: the “boy” in Boy Scouts of America.
One could maintain that this final capitulation is simply about truth in advertising. Since the Boy Scouts of America is no longer a boys’ organization, it should arguably stop using the word “boy.” But no one was misled. Any girl who wanted to join would soon learn, if she did not already know, that the Boy Scouts includes girls.
By some accounts, getting rid of “boy” was less about attracting a larger female component than about drawing a larger LGBTQ component. The ubiquitous Sydney Ireland told PBS that this latest name change is “going to benefit everyone, including young men, young women, nonbinary people.” Scout CEO Roger Krone claimed to the Associated Press that the name change sends the message that “everyone . . . can bring their authentic self” and be welcomed. The language of “authenticity” is associated with novel issues of gender identity more than with being female. But in any case, the historical Scouts were not about affirming a navel-gazing self, “authentic” or otherwise; they were about equipping an otherwise puny self with a timeless, expansive code of selfless values.
The Girl Scouts will never give up the word “girl” in the name of inclusivity; nor will it end its all-girl membership rules. Only men are called upon to cancel their presence and their traditions. With the final erasure of “boy” from Boy Scouts of America, the progressive war on American institutions notches another victory. We are all the casualties.
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