The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts could not be more different. Besides the obvious focus of their organization on girls and boys respectively, the Girl Scouts are an inclusive organization, while the Boy Scouts have gone to the Supreme Court of the United States twice for their right to discriminate- once for the right to exclude atheists and a second time for the right to exclude gay and bisexual men and boys and lesbian women who might be serving as Scout Masters. Girl Scouts does not require that members believe in any higher power and they are committed to diversity and inclusion. For example, Girl Scouts of Colorado recently made the following statement:
“We accept all girls in kindergarten through 12th grade as members. If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout ….Our requests for support of transgender kids have grown, and Girl Scouts of Colorado is working to best support these children, their families and the volunteers who serve them.”
Boy Scouts, on the other hand, continue to push forward a narrow idea of what constitutes a boy or man in our society as indicated by the following advertising campaign.
It is possible that this is some strange Boy Scout homage to the novembeard campaign, but somehow I doubt it. If this turns out to be real, and it appears to be at this time, what is one to make of it?
