Yeah no. People are reacting to the way association with various religious groups have cause scouting, sometimes gleefully, to deny freedom of religion & freedom of association to particular classes of people.
I was told I’d never make Eagle Scout be cause I am an atheist. The state level organization, And a lot of local parents and scouts threw a fit when a local Muslim family signed their sons up. The same elements prevented my mother from running a Girl Scout group in tandem with the cub scout den she ran. Our regional boy scout troop attempted to prevent that girl scout troop from participating in “BSA activities”, meaning they intervened in an attempt to prevent them from camping. And they banned the local girl scout troop from using their lodge for anything (the lodge they freely rent out for weddings). And the national organization would not allow her to continue as a scout leader past the cub scout level. Or even get much if any recognition or rank as a scout leader or master when she was leading our cub scout den.
Once I hit the Boy Scout level they mostly did dangerous things to boys.
We had a couple gay scouts. Both of them were left tied to a tree, smeared with shit and pelted with rocks.
One of them promptly quit. The other went full Eagle Scout. Participated in the attack on the other guy. And is still in the closet. I hear he has 3 kids.
I did Venturing, it’s not like Boy Scouts in the slightest. Nor is 4-H. Which is more my point, there are plenty of co-gendered, super inclusive organizations that get along just fine. They’re just not the same as Boy Scouts, or Girl Scouts. And to simply say all organizations for kids should be 100% alike - should all just be like Venturing or 4-H or band camp or school or whatever - just doesn’t sit well with me.
And please note I have no dog in the whole “Mormon”/“religious freedom”/ exclusionary fight.
Again I’m not saying they don’t operate “just fine” I’m saying they’re fundamentally different than an organization that caters exclusively to boys or girls.
Would you really want to be responsible for 2 dozen boys and girls ranging in ages from 11 to 17 on some camping trip to the woods? Or how about summer camp, now it’s 1,000? Feel free to argue that it’s totally doable but there’s a reason it’s not really done and has a lot more to do with liability and risk than moral suasion.
You said that you see that having both is a liability and has more downsides than positives. I think reality disagrees with you.
I have no data (and neither do you) to support your statement that since co-ed Scouting everything has been “operating just fine”, so I’ll just leave this argument alone.
I was in 4-H as a kid and I’m a den leader for my son’s Cub Scout troop today. They aren’t identical organizations but I can assure you from personal experience that they have PLENTY in common, including summer camps.
If the idea of allowing girls to join still alarms you then you may be reassured to learn that individual units (i.e. Cub Scout Dens) will still be single-gender, so any hanky-panky on camping trips will still have to be of the homosexual variety.
Other countries have had coed scouts for decades and the BSA moving in that direction seems like proof enough, and I can absolutely find data. A cursory Google search while at work and I find a lot of positive documentation advocating for coed scouts but then again…
Girl Scouts and Boy scouts have far less in common than Venturing and Boy scouts do.
I don’t know about 4H, but venturing has the same upper org structure, and should have the same concepts of centralized and standardized advancement procedures, as well as a mission to have outdoor experiences. (Venturing with more of a focus on High Adventure.)
GSA appears to be a whole bunch of age-based troops operating as ships in the night, with no particular overall program goal, other than perhaps cookie sales. (And I’m not knocking that.)
But the experience of a girl in the GSA appears to be much more influenced by the program determined by the leader, as opposed to the general framework imposed by the BSA. (Granted, a bad scoutmaster isn’t going to be a great fit for the scouts in the program.)
Scouting in many other countries has been coed for years. There are many, some quite large, coed scouting organizations in the US. Coed summer camps are normal here as are increasingly coed college dorms. Public schools in the US see coed by default as are their field trips. And BSA isn’t doing this just for Shits and giggles. Since at least the 90s many young women have been actively participating in scouting, without problem, in unofficial or semi official capacity. And have been fighting for recognition. As have a large number of women who act as den leaders at the scout level officially, And as defacto leaders and scout masters at the Boy Scout level unofficially.
Where are all these extreme difficulties and problems with allowing children to mix across genders?
There’s nothing odd about this at all, to me it seems almost expected. Take a bunch of very nice people who tend to make life decisions with guidance from authority figures and who are willing to aggressive defend those authority figures. Becoming the leader of such a group is an anti-social dominance-oriented asshole’s wet dream. People who tend to obey authority and people who want to dominate other people have a weird relationship that seems to oscillate between symbiosis and parasitism.
Why? And which organisations are eligible? Commercial organisations? Political organisations? Would the local chapter of an American Nazi party qualify? Or the local Amercian Communist Party? Or the local Church of Satan?
Being a former toggle-wearing Brit (just like @euansmith) I had no awareness at the time and have never since heard of such a requirement in the Scouting movement over here.
(ETA @TheGreatParis Did you mean that they’re tightasses or were you literally describing their less than loose bottom cheeks? Probably both apply, I suspect.)
I’m a believing Mormon. Mormons have allowed gay kids in Scouts for years, though they haven’t allowed Scout leaders to be gay. I can’t say for sure, but my impression was also that this change has been in the works for a long time. When Church President Thomas S. Monson died in January, I think that was the “true” end of our relationship with the Scouts, as he was a big booster of the program. I think the Church has wanted its own version of the program that could work with boys and girls for a while. (And the “new” Church-created youth program, rolling out in 2020, will still allow gay or transgender kids to participate.)
