The Neutering of the Boy Scouts

An Attack on All-Male Spaces

by John Carpenter

On May 8, 2024, some were solemnly commemorating the 1945 Allied victory in Europe. British lawyer Charlotte Proudman was reveling in a new but no less historical triumph. On that “momentous day,” as a result of her tireless campaigning, the Garrick, an all-male social club for lawyers and judges, would finally admit women. So, Proudman asked, “Where’s my invitation to become a member?”

Evidently she secured one. Within a week or two she posted a photo of herself draped in the Garrick necktie, and asked: “Now we’ve succeeded in forcing the Garrick to admit women, which all-male club should be next on my list?”

One club she need not bother with is the Boy Scouts. The day before Proudman’s triumph, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) sent its alumni an e-mail with “exciting news” to share. As of 2025, the Boy Scouts will have a new name: “Scouting America.” One might have thought of a better acronym than “SA” for an organization whose members sport uniforms of brown shirts, but in this case the cause for concern lies in a slightly different direction.

So, why the change? You won’t find out from the letter. “I understand there may be questions on your mind,” wrote President Rich Pfaltzgraff of the National Eagle Scout Association, using his best corporate PR newspeak to avoid addressing any. President Roger Krone of the BSA chirped that “we seek to ensure that everyone feels welcome in Scouting.” According to Krone’s press release, the name change only reflects “the organization’s ongoing commitment to welcome every youth and family in America to experience the benefits of Scouting.” The “ongoing goal” is to serve “young people:” “Our mission remains unchanged,” it says, gesturing grandly at the more than one hundred years of the organization’s history.

The problem is that this is a centennial history of serving some 130 million boys—a word which does not appear anywhere in Krone’s press release or in Pfaltzgraff’s message, except as part of the soon-to-be-defunct name.

So what happened to those boys? What Krone and Pfaltzgraff are papering over is that one need not be a boy to be a Boy Scout. In fact, that’s been the case since 2017, when the BSA first started admitting girls, provided that they identified as boys. The same year they announced that actual girls would also be admitted (to the Cub Scouts in 2018, and to the Boy Scouts in 2019). Girls could be Boy Scouts. As more and more girls joined, the name change became all but inevitable.

Why did this happen? And how?

Traditional masculinity and the egalitarian guillotine

Let me first offer a guess at why. This was not just about giving girls a shot at exploring the wilderness. I’m sympathetic to that cause. Where we lived, my outdoorsy sister couldn’t find a Girl Scout troop interested in more than arts and crafts. That was a pity. But with the national effort that went into changing the Boy Scouts—on which, more below—the Girl Scouts could easily have been goaded into developing more outdoor programming.

Rather, the erasure of boys from the Boy Scouts is symptomatic of a wider societal attack on masculinity. The familiar trans invasion of spaces set aside for women, from toilets to sports teams, runs parallel to a feminist assault on spaces set aside for men. It is as though, to smash the patriarchy once and for all, men must not be allowed to meet together on their own terms.

On that hypothesis, the Boy Scouts of America was a well-chosen target. Against the backdrop of America’s beautiful national parks, it cultivated reverence for God and service to our country, made concrete in the communities in which we lived. And it did so in an ethos of healthy masculinity, which emphasized responsibility, brotherhood, and interdependence in pursuit of the common good. If you’re unfamiliar with the code of conduct, have a look at the Oath and Law, and imagine 50 or so boys and young men standing at attention and barking this out in unison, just after the Pledge of Allegiance, and quite unironically:

On my honor

I will do my best

To do my duty

To God and my country

To obey the Scout Law

To help other people at all times

To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

A Scout is:

Trustworthy.

Loyal.

Helpful.

Friendly.

Courteous.

Kind.

Obedient.

Cheerful.

Thrifty.

Brave.

Clean.

Reverent.

There is enough in this to shape a world and a life. And a whole world of graduated skill sets and challenges and traditions did indeed support this formation. Often it was best taught through the example of the good men who volunteered their time to teach us what they knew. Many of them were models of the kinds of husbands and fathers we wanted to be when we grew up.

Like the outdoors skills practiced by the Scouts—as Lord Baden-Powell himself noted—these values are good for both boys and girls to learn. But we need to learn again to say that there are ways of living them out as men and as women.

Don’t get me wrong. Much can be said for co-education, just as much can be said for mothers. But a mother shouldn’t follow a boy everywhere, and neither should co-education. He needs a space where, in the best possible sense, and on the path to a healthy manhood, “boys will be boys.” It’s good that there was a place where the nerd and jock, the cool kid and the outcast, are forced to meet on the same terms—without the sexual anxieties of the typical American high school, and with a common ethos and practical work at hand. This meant, for one, just being goofy. But more seriously, when undertaking anything, Boy Scouts knew they have to be able to rely on each other for food, for equipment, for water, for navigation, for first aid. To rely on others, each boy learned that he himself had to be the sort of young man on whom others could rely. Boy Scouts was a place where, far from the government, far from the government’s hyper-sexualized factory schools, far from the hyper-mothering tribe mothers, boys could learn from their seniors, compete with their peers, teach their juniors, plan things, fail at them, screw up, fall, face the consequences, pick themselves up, get back to it, and grow up to be men.

Boy Scouts of America, 50th Jubilee stamp. Design by Norman Rockwell. Credit: Rob Weir, https://garystockbridge617.getarchive.net/media/stamp-us-1960-4c-boy-scouts-of-america-7c01d6

Piety, patriotism, and traditional masculinity—these three virtues were once mainstream. But I suspect that it was precisely these that doomed the Boy Scouts to the egalitarian guillotine.

If that’s more or less why, it’s still worth asking: How did this happen?

A textbook case of subversion

Societies that want to do so are generally capable of resisting pressure from without. Societies of uncertain conviction, and those which have become corrupt, cannot resist that external pressure. They fold.

Sadly, with its set of distinctive virtues, the Boy Scouts was an organization with a clear target on its uniformed back. Starting in the 1980s, the ACLU was party to some 14 lawsuits against the BSA for alleged discrimination. Was a mother barred from leadership? Discrimination! Was some kind of faith—however vaguely defined—required of membership, and did the Scouts nonetheless sometimes receive discounts? A violation of the separation clause! Eventually, the BSA’s heteronormativity took center stage.

There were some important legal victories, both for the Scouts and for any healthy civil society. In BSA vs. Dale (2000) the Supreme Court found that private organizations do indeed have the right to set their own membership requirements. At that point, the campaign against the Scouts turned social. Activists—external and internal—put unrelenting pressure on charitable sponsors, parks, service academies, schools, and others either to end policies favorable to the Scouts or to cease working with them entirely.

Some of the Scouts’ national leaders held the line. As recently as June 2012—twelve years ago!—the BSA’s position on homosexual members and leaders was still clear. The organization acknowledged that same-sex attraction was for families to discuss, not something to be “open and avowed” in the organization. It reaffirmed its status as a free and voluntary organization, welcoming to those who share its values and not out to persecute those who don’t—but also not obliged to admit those who don’t.

By May 2013, however, not a full year later, the BSA had reversed course, and admitted openly gay Scouts. By mid-2015, it was admitting openly gay leaders, too.

What had happened? There was rot within the leadership, and it came in two varieties.

The first was that the national board included extremely wealthy members who disagreed with the policy. These were the CEOs of Ernst & Young and AT&T. These two CEOs expressed their displeasure at the 2012 vote, and publicly vowed to change things. They certainly did. Here is a sample of the influential corporations and politicians who, in their wake, directed their righteous anger against the BSA because of its traditional view of sexuality: Chase Manhattan, Levi Strauss, Fleet Bank, CVS, Pew Charitable Trusts, United Way, Caterpillar Inc., Lockheed Martin, Steven Spielberg, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney.

Oh, and Madonna.

Does your institution have the courage to stand that mob down—especially when your most coveted celebrity board members are egging them on?

The Boy Scouts didn’t, and I would guess that this has something to do with a second source of internal rot. Concurrently with the assaults from without, and with collusion from within, some men in the leadership had abandoned fundamental principles of its own ethos, and far too often allowed serious evil within to go unchecked. Revoltingly, as with all organizations that involve children, the BSA has had its share of perverts and criminals, and the leadership did not do enough to stop them from abusing boys. In this case as in others, painful but salutary litigation was required to clean house.  

Boy Scouts of America Issue - June 30, 1950 131,635,000 issued - Commemorative BSA stamp first issued by the U.S. in 1950: Designer: C. R. Chickering - Engraver: C. A. Brooks. Credit: Bureau of Engraving and Printing; Imaging by Jphill19, Wikimedia Commons.

A return to the founding ideals was in order. But for the decent men involved, the experience of the litigation would have been totally demoralizing. How could one take a public stand for traditional masculinity and sexuality with closeted skeletons like that coming to light? And others would have been too complicit. What kind of institutional courage could one expect?

Far easier to give the crowds what they want, and to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That, I would guess, is how it all happened.

The future of true Scouting

Is true Scouting gone forever? Although the awokening of the SA has destroyed the most accessible way for American boys to become Scouts, the spirit lives on in pockets of resilience and renewal. Many others have seen the BSA sell out in principle and practice and have taken matters into their own hands.

Trail Life USA, for instance, is a Christian network of Scouts that dissented from egalitarian drift of the BSA. It now counts over a thousand units and some 60,000 members. The Federation of North American Explorers is smaller in the US, but it is an associate member of the thriving Scouts and Guides of Europe, a Catholic Scouting association with separate boys’ and girls’ wings. The French branch, for instance, the Guides et Scouts d’Europe, has been one of the main reasons that vibrant Catholic subculture has survived in the midst of the aggressively secular French state.

So if Scouting in America has a future, I think it belongs to the Trailmen and Explorers. There will be pressure to subvert them from without. That much they can count on.

I hope that the fathers and young men leading these alternatives will be similarly alive to the risk of rot from within. If they stay vigilant, as good Scouts should, then they will stand a chance of handing down an experience of true masculinity to boys who will need it badly.