Girling the Boy Scouts

Men — and the boys who aspire to become men — are in a sorry 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 Boy Scouts of America—that storied organization that once epitomized the best of masculinity—is no more. 

It’s now Scouts BSA.

The word “boy” has even been expunged from the organization’s promotional materials, replaced with the word “youth,” as in: “For more than 100 years, Scouting programs have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath…”

How and why the Boy Scouts have been brought down is a case study in how the progressive left worms its way into an institution and hollows it out until there’s nothing left but a shell.

The Boy Scouts were an easy target: wholesome, patriotic, and, above all, male. Feminists and gay advocacy groups started suing the organization for its failures of “inclusivity.” 

In 2015, the Scouts dropped its ban on openly gay scoutmasters. 

Trans Scouts came next. 

In 2019, the Scouts admitted girls.

Within short order, the Scouts had hired its first Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion.

Scout CEO Roger Krone summed up the rebranding perfectly.  He told the Associated Press that the name change — Boy Scouts of America to Scouts BSA — sends the message that “everyone . . . can bring their authentic self…” and be welcomed.

All this has happened when the need to valorize males, or merely acknowledge their existence, is greater than ever. 

But, of course, that was the idea: to emasculate the Boy Scouts.

What could be more frightening than an organization that aspires to create good men? 

The Boy Scouts were 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.”

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 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. Whereas in the early twentieth century, boys lost their biological fathers to war, 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 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. 

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 de-valorization of males, making the possibility of even a symbolic father figure remote. Positive male characters in television and movies have — more often than not —  been replaced by dolts and abusers.

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 a malady. Civilization-creating traits such as competitiveness, stoicism, and the desire to provide for others, the APA declared, were not behaviors to be promoted, but to be fearful of. 

One can guess what Teddy Roosevelt would have thought of all this. He and Baden-Powell wanted to equip boys with a timeless code of selfless values — to help turn boys into good men, worthy husbands and fathers. 

No one thinks of asking the Girl Scouts to sacrifice the word “girl” in the name of inclusivity; nor 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 left has brought down another American institution. 

The Boy Scouts are no more. 

Will they rise again?

All it would take is a few good men.

I’m Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Prager University.