Scouts’ (dis)honor

It’s Girl Scout Cookies season. And as we approach finals week, a lot of my friends have received boxes of cookies as gifts. Not because the cookies are fantastic (though they are), but because conservative groups have recently taken aim at the Girl Scouts of America. Still, the organization has held its ground. And what they support, what they stand for, makes me love them.

(P.S. Did you know there’s a Girl Scout Cookies-finder app for your smartphone?)

The GSA isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s infinitely more progressive and commendable than the Boy Scouts of America.

The Girl Scouts have been around for 100-plus years and have actively sought to help young women empower themselves, which has resulted in a lot of conservative backlash over the years.

Last year, people boycotted Girl Scout Cookies sales in Colorado because a transgender child was allowed to join. Despite the backlash, the Colorado GS issued a statement saying: “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.”

Recently, an organization of Catholic bishops began investigating the GSA because of its “affiliation” with Planned Parenthood (because, really, what else could the Catholic Church possibly have to be more concerned about right now?).

These bishops are looking in the wrong place, though. They should be looking at the Boy Scouts.

Unaffiliated with the Girl Scouts, the BSA is far from being an “exemplary” organization. Since the 1970s, the Boy Scouts have actively discriminated against sexual minorities. In 2000, the organization took its hatred all the way to the Supreme Court, where the court ruled that the Scouts had the right to bar men who identify as homosexual from being troop leaders. At the same time, the BSA also barred atheists and agnostics from leading troops.

In fact, the organization’s history is littered with bigotry and hatred—it has strong ties to the Mormon church as well as the Catholic and evangelical Christian religions, all of which preach that gay men and women are abominations.

Last year, the BSA denied an Eagle Scout award to a teen boy because he happened to identify as gay. He’d been a member since he was 6 but had only come out that year, and his Eagle Scout project involved building a tile wall of tolerance at a local middle school to comfort those who were bullied. He advocated for change but the Scouts refused to acknowledge his work. How’s that for honor?

And, recently, a “den mother” was forced to resign after revealing she identifies as a lesbian. Apparently lesbians can’t be moms or good role models.

Luckily (and thankfully), some of the BSA’s largest corporate donors stopped supporting the BSA because of its discriminatory practices and blatant homophobia. And these are big name companies: Intel, IBM, UPS, American Airlines, Portland General Electric. That’s right: PGE.

According to the Huffington Post, an ex-scout in California is pushing the state to pass a bill that would end tax breaks for youth groups and organizations like the BSA—organizations that maintain an agenda that discriminates against sexual minority youth.

Discrimination isn’t the only problem plaguing the Boy Scouts. In 2010, Portland attorney Kelly Clark filed a $29 million lawsuit against the BSA. Clark told the Supreme Court jury that the BSA had files documenting more than a century of abuse—abuse the organization never reported.

Last fall, Clark posted to his website 14,500 pages of files that the BSA appealed to the court to keep confidential—the “Perversion Files,” as they came to be known—which date from 1965–84 and contain information about sexual abuse that the Boy Scouts hid for years.

This past January, the California Supreme Court ordered the BSA to release two decades’ worth of records detailing sexual abuse allegations across the U.S, the Huffington Post reported. As stories and lawsuits have emerged, it’s clear the organization covered up a lot of child abuse and often protected those who perpetrated that abuse. In many cases, authorities were never alerted, which meant the abusers were free to continue molesting children.

Sound familiar? Oh, right. That’s exactly what the Catholic Church did.

Recently, The Associated Press published an expose that highlights years of incest and abuse that Brandon Gray perpetrated on two of his children. Gray had worked as a Scout executive for the BSA and was terminated because he molested troop members. The BSA never told anyone the reason for Gray’s termination.

The Gray siblings’ story isn’t the only one—there must be thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. For an organization that claims to teach young boys about “honor,” the BSA is far from living up to its own ideals.