Girls will have new opportunities in Boy Scouts

Editor's note: The following comment was submitted on semissourian.com in response to Adrienne Ross' column in Tuesday's Southeast Missourian.

I have been an active member of the Boy Scouts of America for nearly 40 years, and I volunteer as Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 2 at Grace United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau.

Troop 2 was first organized in 1917 in Cape Girardeau, and has been continuously chartered by Grace for 90 of those 101 years.

Much of my career path and many of my long-term personal friendships have been positively influenced by scouting.

I have been a paid staffer, a local, district, council, area and regional volunteer, and have staffed national events that brought together 40,000 youth from all over the world. I like to think that I'm as qualified as anyone to speak on the organization, and I'd like to address the points Adrienne Ross touched on in her commentary.

My earliest recollection of public scrutiny of the organization came when I was attending the 1985 National Scout Jamboree as a youth. A large group of protesters were assembled outside the gates of Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia as our bus pulled onto the base. This group was opposing the exclusionary membership practices mandated by the National Council of the BSA. As a 15-year-old boy from a small town in Southeast Missouri, I had no clue what they were talking about. I soon learned, because crews of reporters popped up daily to try to catch a scout off guard and entice him to give a meaty sound bite for the evening news. In the years since, the organization has spent millions of dollars defending itself in court, ultimately winning a Supreme Court decision that, as a private organization, it could maintain its "litmus test" for membership.

The price for that very publicly scrutinized Supreme Court win? The organization began losing access to public institutions and facilities it historically enjoyed. The BSA lost support from groups like the PTA, state and national parks, military bases, and were refused access to community facilities in more progressive areas of the country. The reality is that although the BSA continued to maintain a public profession of exclusion, local Troops and councils had long recognized that its units (Troops, Packs, Posts, Crews and Ships) were a reflection of their local communities, and those units were going to keep maintaining their own set of standards that appealed to their own local patrons.

In the BSA, chartering organizations (the local churches, service clubs and other groups that "own" the units) approve their own leaders, anyway, and always had. Community organizations already had almost ultimate control of their membership and leadership.

A few years ago, the National Council of the BSA decided (and I paraphrase) that the organization would no longer automatically be exclusionary toward its youth membership. The same statement came shortly thereafter for its adult leaders. The organization finally realized that having such a policy wasn't enforceable, wasn't practical, and it was also disingenuous.

A Troop at a church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri was going to scrutinize its membership differently than a VFW in Houston, Texas, and even more differently than a YMCA in New York City.

Regardless of what the official policy was, units had been exercising their own standards for 100 years, anyway. It just wasn't on every blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed, available to millions of people at a moment's notice. The world was getting smaller, and the Boy Scouts of America was a large target in a culture war it did not create.

To your next, and most timely, topic: Girls in the Boy Scouts of America. Perhaps it isn't widely known that girls ages 14-20 have been in the BSA programs called Exploring, Sea Scouting and Venturing for almost 50 years. We are the only non-Muslim country in the world that doesn't have females in our youngest youth divisions, and if you attend any international event, you will see as many females as you see males. (Kind of like most mainstream church camps I'm familiar with.) I have certainly heard from a few long-time Boy Scout supporters that they are less than happy with the decision to allow girls into Boy Scouts, the program for 11-17 year olds. However, the vast majority of the vitriol I have heard and seen has been from people who have never volunteered an hour or donated a penny to the organization. Much of the ugliness has come from people on the periphery who view the program through a long lens, who don't truly understand it, and who will never be impacted by it anyway. There are grotesque mischaracterizations, over-simplifications and blatant falsehoods that intend only to further someone's agenda and impugn an organization that greatly benefits the communities it serves.

A common opinion I hear expressed is "Why do girls have to be in Boy Scouts, they already have Girl Scouts." Here's the reality: The Boy Scouts of America is NOT the Girl Scouts of the USA. At the very beginning of both organizations, they were very closely aligned and their programs of leadership and advancement were very similar. The Girl Scouts of the USA took a different program direction many years ago. Although there are many similarities, there are many more differences. The Girl Scouts of the USA is a great program and has served many young women well for a long time, and it will no doubt continue to do so. It does not, however, have the same advancement structure, youth (or adult) leadership structure, patrol method, or high adventure opportunity that is built in the Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America. It's simply different.

If you want your daughter to join a legacy Troop that her mother, grandmother or great-grandmother was a member of, you can't do that in Girl Scouts.

If you want your 11-year old daughter to lead a patrol of six to eight other girls, as one of several other patrols in a Troop of girls age 11-17, she can't do that in Girl Scouts.

If you want your daughter to be elected by her peers as the Troop's Senior Patrol Leader of a Troop of 50 girls of varying ages, she can't do that in Girl Scouts.

If you want your daughter to run every weekly Troop meeting, the annual calendar planning session, the weekend campouts, and the Troop's activities at long-term summer camp, she can't do that in Girl Scouts.

If you want your daughter to participate in (NYLT) National Youth Leadership Training, the gold standard for advanced youth leadership training in the nation, she can't do that in Girl Scouts.

If you want your daughter to lead a group of other girls from towns all over Southeast Missouri to the National Scout Jamboree, she can't do that in Girl Scouts.

If you want your daughter to be selected as a member of a multi-state delegation to the World Scout Jamboree with Scouts from 150 other countries, she can't do that in Girl Scouts. If you want your daughter to advance through the ranks of Scout, Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and to the venerated rank of Eagle, she can't do that in Girl Scouts. She can do lots of great things in Girl Scouts, but she can't do those things. Next year, she'll have a choice.

Girls will now have all of those program opportunities, and will still be members of all-girl Troops where they can develop with their peers. They will have female leaders. They will be chartered by organizations in the community that believe in their ability to succeed, and refuse to subscribe to a philosophy that they should settle for a different program simply because they are girls. Having access to the BSA program opportunities won't define girls in Scouts BSA as boys, as masculine, as a gender, non-gender, freakish or bizarre. What it will do is provide them with an opportunity they've never had before. It will allow them to exercise a level of leadership not available anywhere else. It will allow them not to BE boys, but to be equal to boys.

And finally, having girls excel in Scouts BSA will have no negative impact on the boys. It won't lessen the meaning or credibility of the Eagle Scout award, or the experiences they will get as members of their own male Troops. It won't take opportunities away from them. It won't detract from male bonding around the campfire. There's no doubt that boys will begin seeing their female counterparts at events. They might work together on service projects to feed the hungry, raise flags to honor our veterans, clean up the community or compete against each other in a geocaching competition. It just might help our young men begin seeing their female counterparts as capable, intelligent and worthy peers in life, and reduce the misogyny that is rampant in all parts of society today. This is why most of the people I know who are current, active and supportive members of the BSA have been calling for an option for their daughters for a long time. The time is now, and I am already hearing from many people who want their daughter to have the opportunities their sons already experienced. I wish mine had.

The reality is that a small percentage of our youth are involved in, or stay in, ANY program like the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Trail Life, American Heritage Girls, or 4H. I salute and applaud anyone who volunteers their time and resources to support them. Since participation is so low, there is really no competition. Find a group you like and that you believe in, and support it. That's the only way ANY of them are going to survive. If they don't survive, the young people will be the losers in the short run, and society will eventually see the negative impact. If you don't know what a group is like, attend a meeting and find out for yourself. You just might be pleasantly surprised.

Tony Smee is a resident of Cape Girardeau.