Girling the Boy Scouts | City Journal
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.)
Heather MacDonald.