Give a Boy Scout a month at summer camp, and he can learn everything from archery and orienteering to bugling and scuba diving. Altogether, he can pick from a catalogue of more than 135 merit badges. But while both journalism and politics are offered, there’s no badge for virtue signaling.
One would think otherwise from the breathless coverage of President Trump’s address to the National Boy Scout Jamboree. Over at NBC, Chuck Todd protested the speech as “totally unfair to the kids.” And on the left side of the aisle, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., whined that it was “icky.”
But Trump wasn’t nearly as tasteless as the Left’s sudden complaints about “politicization” of the Boy Scouts of America. Honestly, they were making the youth organization their cultural whipping boy long before the first troop pitched their tent at the jamboree this year.
Around for more than a century, Boy Scouts have come under fire in the last two decades because of their membership standards concerning gay boys and leaders. They were regularly attacked as bigots in the editorial pages of the New York Times. They were mocked by the likes of Madonna (the elderly Queen of Pop creepily proclaimed she knew “how to scout for boys“). And they were assaulted in the courts again and again and again.
As a civic organization reinforced by thousands of little Middle-American churches and synagogues which served as chartering organizations, the Boy Scouts held out against public opinion. As a 501(c)3 beholden to corporate donors, though, the organization surrendered their stance.
One after the other, Verizon, UPS, and many more dropped their support in the face of petitions demanding the Boy Scouts update their standards. It’s been a slippery slope since then.
The national organization voted in 2013 to allow gay members before doubling down to allow gay adult leaders in 2015. This year, another milestone was reached when the organization voted to allow transgender youth to join its ranks.
Following the logic of those fluctuating membership standards, 16-year-old Sydney Ireland of Manhattan has petitioned the Boy Scouts to let her join. NPR and others have been more than happy to document her struggle against the standards of a private organization, describing them as “unfair.”
Viewing the forest from those trees then, the coverage seems over the top. Chuck Todd, for instance, is right that Trump should “keep politics out of the jamboree.” But he’s wrong to pretend that the Boy Scouts have survived as an apolitical organization. Instead, they’ve been remade in the image of the contemporary Left.
While I earned my Eagle Scout rank years ago, I’m not too old to remember those debates and to speculate on what my troop’s reaction to the president would’ve been like.
At Ransburg Summer camp, sexual orientation never came up as a topic of conversation. Helping other people at all time, the basis of the Boy Scout Oath, did.
And so, around the proverbial campfire, I imagine the leaders of my troop might condemn Trump’s political grandstanding (especially his attacks on President Barack Obama). But I cannot imagine them pretending in conversations with other adults that the Boy Scouts hadn’t been under political fire for the better part of two decades.
Already, the Boy Scouts of America has distanced itself from the president in a public statement. No doubt, discussions will ensue. The Citizenship in the Nation merit badge will take on new relevance. And perhaps a new course on public speakers will be charted.
But, of course, that’s only for the boys still in Boy Scouts. As Mark Hemingway reported for The Weekly Standard, this rite of passage has an uncertain future for kids whose troops were chartered by more conservative organizations.
This summer, something like 185,000 older boys didn’t pitch tents at camp after the Mormon Church couldn’t accept the organization’s most recent membership change. Of the 2.4 million remaining Boy Scouts in this country, Hemingway observes, one out of every five belongs to a troop sponsored by a Mormon Church.
Admitting these established facts puts the current hysteria in new light. So, perhaps Chuck Todd and Sen. Murphy could do a good turn and at least admit that the organization has been politicized for years.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
