AwakeEnergyScouter

7 hours ago, qwazse said:

I don’t exactly. (Plus it was an English translation of the page that I think was originally written by youth. So a lot may have been lost in translation and generationally. ) My impression was that the girls’ organization wasn’t playing well with other scout associations, and the king, having been a scout himself, served as a neutral party with authority.

Also, the Swedish scouters who I’ve met were relatively young, and not historians. So their description of their scout movement was limited to their generation. I myself was too immature to strike up a conversation with Carl Gustav, let alone probe him on what it took for he and his fellow citizens to inspire a co-ed scouting organization.

Lesson: if you have elders in your family or friends who were scouts, now is the time to interview them on their childhood and young adult experiences.

I asked my dad, but it was the generation before him that experienced the change so his experience was pretty much like mine... at this point you really need a historian, the people who lived it are almost all dead now.

I did find out that during his time, our troop was a sea scout ship. They spent a lot of spring meetings readying the boats. We still owned some of them when I came through, moored at the same dock. Even though we were a troop we did learn to rig and sail gigs, probably because the troop used to be a ship!

I would have liked to have ordered her thesis, but she only takes Swish as payment and you can't open a Swish account with a foreign address.

Do you remember how it was contentious?

Total sidebar: I noticed the manner of mentioning Rinpoche, @SSScout - were you his student?

9 minutes ago, Eagledad said:

Hmm, I know exactly how you feel.

Barry

Are you sincere?

I do not read you to be. Please correct me if I'm wrong. It's quite possible that I am. 

5 hours ago, DannyG said:

I believe scouting teaches youth to be involved and engaged. BSA has Eagle-required merit badges that teach civic engagement: Citizenship in the Community, Nation, World, and Society. Certainly BSA teaches this in a way to find common-ground with others: If you are out in the wilderness with a group you need to work together and solve problems as a group. We are stronger when we work together. If you take a stand as an individual, what are the repercussions to the group? There has to be a good reason and you should have allies who support you.

I don't have much to say on the Eagle project topic since we don't have that in Sweden and haven't read up on the instructions, but reading this sparked a potential initial general view of the line between civic and political: civic is supporting building community in a liberal democracy. To the extent that parties promote policies (often implicitly because everyone in mainstream society agrees) that are consistent with liberal democracy, we count those as civic even though one could argue that technically they are political because a political party advocates for it. That remains true even when, like in this example, mainstream citizens in a liberal democracy actually start taking actions inconsistent with liberal democracy. (The non-mainstream I'm specifically thinking of here is the neonazis in the town I grew up in. They explicitly want to crush liberal democracy, but they are also persona non grata outside their own group and nobody in scouting in Sweden loses any sleep about not listening to them or taking action to prevent them from succeeding.) Uniformed scouts marching in an anti-Nazi march is not like uniformed scouts staffing an "election cabin" to campaign for a particular political party, even though technically being anti-Nazi is a political stand that is also proposed policy for multiple political parties. Being anti-Nazi is being pro-liberal democracy, and thus the scouting backing of what is technically also a policy stand of political parties counts as civic.

Does that make sense? Anybody see any holes?

I actually thought that was very clear. That section of the book stuck with me immediately upon reading and I was literally thinking of it when I wrote the general reflection above. I knew right where to find it to expand on both the actual meaning but also to (hopefully) gently and skillfully deflect the attack on my character. Perhaps it isn't so immediately relatable to everyone, then. My apologies if that wasn't clear.

My point is, I do not appreciate being called duplicitous, and I do not appreciate teachings that are very precious to me and considered a religion by the BSA being called duplicitous. You don't have to agree with the view, but attacking me for holding it is not cool.

4 hours ago, qwazse said:

Youth have a word for situational ethics: duplicity.

I'm talking about karma and recognizing how it operates. That is very different from duplicity. Duplicity is changing moral view to suit oneself; recognizing how karma works is cultivating insight and allows you to at the very least accrue merit if not quite stop generating it entirely.

Volume One of The Profound Treasury of The Ocean of Dharma: The Path of Individual Liberation by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, page 414:

"The Six Types of Karmic Consequence

The general notion of karma is that uncertainty, delusion, or ignorance begins to trigger the mechanisms of lust, or passion, and aggression, which then produce karmic consequences. These consequences are divided into six sections, which represent six ways of organizing our world very badly; (1) the power of volitional action, (2) experiencing what you have planted, (3) white karmic consequences, (4) changing the karmic flow by forceful action, (5) shared karmic situations, (6) interaction of intention and action. It is quite predictable: since our world is created from passion, aggression, and ignorance, we get back from it what we put in. Things are happening constantly in that way. It is very steady and very predictable. (...)

6. Interaction of Intention and Action

The sixth and final karmic consequence is the interaction of intention and action. It is divided into four subcategories.

WHITE INTENTION, WHITE ACTION. The first subcategory is called completely white. An example of completely white karma is respecting your teacher and having devotion. Because that whole approach is related with healthiness rather than revolutionary thinking, ill will, and resentment, a lot of goodness comes out of it. So perpetual whiteness is created.

BLACK INTENTION, BLACK ACTION. The next subcategory is completely black. This is like taking someone's life without any particular excuse or motivation. You have murdered or destroyed something. That is completely black.

WHITE INTENTION, BLACK ACTION. The third and fourth subcategories are mixtures of black and white. The third category is basically positive: with the good intention of protecting the whole, you perform a black action. For instance, with the good intention of protecting the lives of hundreds of people, you kill one person. [My personal note - surely you recognize this category from Western moral philosophical thought as well? The trolley, for example. Surely you have engaged with this category in a hypothetical series of situations yourself.]  That seems to be a good karmic situation. If somebody is going to press the button of the atomic bomb, you shoot that person. Here the intention is white, but the action itself is black, although it has a positive effect.

BLACK INTENTION, WHITE ACTION. In the fourth subcategory, the intention is black and the action is white. This is like being very generous to your enemy while you are trying to poison him; it is a mixture of black and white."

Your intention with your scouts was probably white, but if you honestly didn't realize that the action might have been black then you - and especially anyone reading who still can change the action for their scouts - ought to know that there was something more to know. Hopefully, your scouts were able to turn their suffering into wisdom and compassion and didn't have other karmic circumstances that being expected to take sexism on the chin amplified substantially.

Speech is an act, you know. Four of the ten unmeritorious karmic acts are speech acts. Speech has causes, and is a cause to effects. (Unless, of course, the speaker has transcended karma, but that's not the case we're discussing.) You can hurt people quite well without any physical action. Also, certain kinds of harmful speech tends to precede harmful action, so waiting for predictable action is actively engaging in ignorance (here, meaning not knowing how the world works), which is also a karmic act.

What makes knowing that someone wants you excluded so corrosive is that it means that black intention is on the table, and you need to figure out just how black and just how far that person is willing to go. It forces you into a defensive posture around them at all times. Notice that this is not a free speech issue; it's a social cohesion issue. The problem is not that the government is going to come arrest you and others in a way that undermines liberal democracy, or that you are being pressured with job loss and/or other severe personal consequences for saying unpopular or even revolting things. It's legal to be a neonazi but that doesn't mean that BSA is required to let them sieg heil at scout meetings. What's right in one context can absolutely be wrong in another by consistent moral principles.

Well, generally speaking, that also has to be case-by-case, no? Some boats need rocking and now is the time to do it. But not every boat, and not every boat right now.

All the combinations of good intention, bad intention, good outcome, and bad outcome occur. The trick is to get better at recognizing both intentions and outcomes. Sometimes being conflict averse is bad. Sometimes it builds harmony that leads to strength and functioning. Without a situation or a context you can't really say if it's good or bad.

With a clear and stable mind, we can take the attitude of "first thought, best thought" and do our best to use our good intention to create good outcomes.

30 minutes ago, RememberSchiff said:

Two sides to this. Freedom of expression vs child safety?

Our local Eagle Board approves projects that serve the community for greater good, harmonious, good-PR,... The Board is not looking for controversy or conflict.

So more conflict-averse rather than trying to draw the line between civic and political?

On 4/21/2024 at 5:35 PM, RememberSchiff said:

It appears the GSUSA allows political involvement for their capstone award projects whereas the BSA does not. I doubt my Council Eagle Board would approve this for an Eagle Scout project.

Curious about this. Opposing book bans seems civic to me, as opposed to political because freedom of speech is a bedrock foundation of liberal democracy and the context of book access in community libraries is one in which freedom of speech is appropriately the most salient one, including in historical context. (As opposed to limiting speech to what is scoutlike and consistent with the Scout Law and Oath in BSA contexts, for example.) Wo Bücher brennen...

Why don't you think your council's Eagle Board would approve this?

Like Skeptic, all this attention to gender in BSA scouting made me curious about what gender-segregated scouting in Sweden used to be like. Even the words for gender segregated scouting sound antiquated and sepia-toned. It's hard to imagine. But apparently someone wrote a thesis on it recently, and so Scouterna has an information page on it. Since there's a language barrier for all other WOSM NSOs other than Scouts UK, I thought I'd post a translation.

"Scout magazine MARCH 8, 2022

When the girls took up scouting

That others than boys would be allowed to be part of the Scouts was far from obvious when it started, but despite strong opposition, the pioneers of girl scouting managed to champion their cause. Here is a part of history that is all too often forgotten.

If you've been to a regular scout meeting, you've probably seen it sitting on the wall - the portrait of Robert Baden Powell, the founder of the scouting movement. But have you heard of Agnes Baden Powell? Or Ludde, Pelle, Pirre and the others who made sure that girls also got to experience scouting?

From the beginning, girls were not meant to become scouts, says Bodil Formark, who is a historian and has written the first thesis on the history of girl scouting in Sweden.

- It is quite clear when you consider that the basic foundation of the movement is called Scouting for Boys, she says.

After scouting was launched in 1907, it quickly became a worldwide success. In 1909 it came to Sweden - for boys. Around this year, however, the first steps towards a scouting movement for girls were also taken. At Wallinska School in Stockholm, the three students Gerda Blomberg (Ludde), Elin Fris (Pelle) and Signe Geijer (Pirre) became interested in scouting in 1910, and brought along three of their teachers as scout leaders.

- The Wallinska School was one of the oldest girls' schools in Sweden, a place where many of the first female academics either studied or taught, so it is a special environment in which scouting for girls arose, says Bodil.

At first, the girl scouts were met with resistance - among other things, it was discussed in the press whether it was really appropriate for girls to practice scouting.

- In that way, the story of girl scouting is an example of something that still exists in our society. That what girls or women do is always subject to discussion. Can they play football? Can they do this or what if they do that?

During 1913, Svenska Flickors Scoutförbund (SFS) or Sweden's Girls' Scout Organization was formed, the first organization to bring together girl scouts. In the business that was built up bit by bit, eventually nationally, the girls got to be more than just girls. They could be scouts, with all that that entailed. There were class tests, special badges, world conferences and of course camp activities.

- The movement primarily wanted to educate girls to become good scouts. A lot of girls' and women's history has been about being a girl in the right way, but here we had a movement that said "Well, you're a girl, but you should also be a scout".

In Sweden, women only got the right to vote in 1919 and could participate in their first election in 1921. Girl scouting was thus pioneering girls' freedoms, and Bodil Formark believes that this was due to several things. On the one hand, the girls at the Wallinska School and the other founders belonged to an upper middle class, and therefore had both resources and opportunities to have a spare time.

In part, the first leaders, according to Bodil, were able to handle the debate that arose about girls becoming scouts in a strategic way. By creating a program that was not too radical and outrageous, they were able to gain approval from more people. What they then did could be considerably more radical.

An example is the long skirt that the girl scouts wore as a scout uniform. At the time, the fact that girls wore pants was considered controversial by many.

- There are accounts that they wore the skirts when they went to the camp, but that they threw them off as soon as they got out into the forest. "Oh, how wonderful to be able to climb trees!"

After a long process  with a lot of discussion, the organizations Sweden's Girls' Scout Association and Sweden's Scout Association finally merged in the 1960s. Having separate scout meetings for children of different genders can now feel quite distant. Within Scouterna in Sweden, there are today only a few gender-separated groups.

- Scouterna wants to follow and reflect society! In our society today, and for quite some time now, all genders are mixed in, for example, school and the like, says Anna-Karin Hennig, who is general secretary at the Scouts.

The organization Scouterna is a member of the world organization WAGGGS, which gathers scouts who are girls. Outside Sweden there are still many scouting activities for girls only.

- WAGGGS is one of the world's largest "girls only organizations" and is needed to make it possible for girls and young women around the world to have a leisure occupation. Being part of a mixed organization is simply not possible everywhere in the world, says Anna-Karin.

Bodil Formark believes that the scouting movement in Sweden has so far had problems telling its story. It is the boy scouts that are highlighted and often girl scouting has been forgotten. She wants what has existed, and meant so much to thousands of girls and women, not to be forgotten.

- To understand why the Girl Scout movement has not been given the same space in the writing of history, I believe that the movement would need to learn more about the power imbalances under which the merger took place, but also seriously discuss whether gender-integrated scouting has really increased equality within the movement. For me as a historian, the question of the history of the girl scout movement is ultimately a question of justice. If the movement is to tell its story, which is of course a choice, it should tell the story in a way that does not make half the activity invisible or diminish.

Did you know that…

...it used to be common in Swedish girl scouting with scout names? It could be names like Ludde, Bro, Jerker, Babs, Pålle or Laxen. The names were used, among other things, because it was considered ugly to call an older person "you".

...there were many different special badges for the scouts within the Swedish Girls' Scout Association to earn? They were about lots of different things, such as bookbinding, shooting, barn keeping, astronomy, folk dancing and language interpretation.

...Signe Hammarsten (Ham) was not only one of the first three leaders of Swedish girl scouts, but was also the mother of the famous writer and artist Tove Jansson.

Do you want to learn more about Girl Scouting in Sweden?

Bodil Formark's dissertation The well-situated girl: About the history of the Swedish girl scout movement 1910-1940 can be ordered at denvalsitueradeflickan.wordpress.com . Last autumn, "Knight of a Thousand Adventures" was performed - a theater performance inspired by the thesis."

Original text at https://www.scouterna.se/aktuellt/tidningen-scout/nar-tjejerna-intog-scouting/

8 hours ago, qwazse said:

I expected my youth to take it on the chin and press on.

I agree with yknot. This is harsh. Like, taken aback harsh.

On 4/13/2024 at 6:59 PM, RememberSchiff said:

IMHO, part of leadership, character-building, and citizenship is teaching our scouts how to respond thoughtfully and positively (Scout Oath and Law) to what they perceive as an injustice, incorrect, or plain stupid.

At a monthly School Board meeting should I pull scouts when cuts are discussed to their favorite programs? Let them hear, think, and then speak in their own defense.

Adults undermining the sense of worth of a child by communicating that that specific child is unwanted is not the same as not getting what you wanted or an inconvenience. It does real harm to children to hear that adults that have power over them don't think they should be where they are, even though the rules and society at large say it's fine. (As I write that, specific adult faces flash in front of me.) Losing a favorite after-school program isn't like being singled out to be told by adults that there's something bad about you and you shouldn't be where you are. But not your friends, note. The damage comes largely from that you're not in the same boat; the afterschool program isn't being shut down, you just can't be in it anymore because Reasons but not something you did, something you are. The impact of being excluded for something you are is very different.

Did you know that 40% of LGBTQIA+ youth want to commit suicide because of the poor treatment they get? Scouts of all things should be a safe place for them to be accepted unconditionally. Racism and sexism take a toll, too. Meeting unkindness from so many people for something you are, not do, has a different impact than losing something you liked along with all your friends who are in the same boat. The patterns in how people behave grate on you in a different way than one-off things, especially when the gaslighting starts. Black youth who are met with low regard in their community exhibit more depressive symptoms after then also experiencing more racism than usual. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30652904/) Than usual. Imagine how much sadness and depression we could prevent if they experienced no racism. This happens in scouts, too.

A Black scouter shared the story of his son being called the n-word in scouts. The other white scouters were not so interested in dealing with the hurt that this caused, and the parents denied that their scouts would ever do what they just did.

The patterns after the scout law is broken when it's due to other scouts and scouters disliking the presence of a scout in a particular demographic are very similar to what happens with whistleblowers. Organizations often try to gaslight whistleblowers, which makes the retaliation harm worse because it shatters your confidence in how the world works when the institution that was supposed to protect you harms you instead and then tries to pretend otherwise. There's a second layer of betrayal there.

I have been in that position of being expected to fix adults or deal with adult dysfunction that other adults didn't want to deal with as a child. I was very angry at them and I lost all my respect for them. Children having to lead adults is confusing lha, nyen and lu, the natural order of things. As a hat goes on the head and not the feet, adults lead children, not the other way around. Finding opportunities for children to practice leadership is good and important, but children are still children. The opportunities need to be age-appropriate. There is such a thing as throwing children into the leadership deep end without swimming lessons, and asking them to sacrifice their own well-being to show adults that people are people isn't age-appropriate. It is our duty as the adults in charge to protect scouts - really do it. Mandela, Gandhi, and MLK were adults when they did their human rights work. We should not expect children to fix adult messes.

Forgot one of the most important things... Scout-led! Absolute must. Took it for granted while writing.

Indeed a great question! Almost like a goal writing prompt 😄

* Smiling and laughing scouts at all events / no one left out, all scouts "invited to dance" by other scouts

* Scouts want to hang out outside scouting because they're friends

* Good and excited attendance at all outdoor events, of which camping and hiking are offered monthly and other outdoors life skills (fishing, orienteering, firebuilding and tending, skiing, skating, etc) are offered at least occasionally. Troops should backpack at least a few times a year

* Troop goes to camporee/jamboree every year, at least considers going to next WSJ

* Scouts following the Scout Law, Scout Oath, Outdoor Code, and LNT consistently 

* At least basic knowledge of BP and the scouting movement as a whole, attend JOTA/JOTI

* Skills and automatic responsibility acceptance growth in individual scouts, especially in outdoors life and scout craft skills

* Scouts take pride in their advancement and set their sights in the next "level" of growth, whether there is a belt loop or badge for it or not (if you blew requirements out of the water, do even more!)

* Good ceremonies that touch the scouts wordlessly and feel special 

* Good windhorse in the committee as well as among the scouts

* Full year program

* Good community relationships

4 hours ago, BetterWithCheddar said:

I would say an adult leader meeting or online forum dedicated to "issues and politics" are acceptable places to discuss membership changes, whereas your child's Pinewood Derby or Blue and Gold Banquet are not. 

An adult leader meeting is different from an open online forum targeted at scouters. If this was a restricted-access forum, then it would be equivalent to an adult leader meeting. This is on the open internet, no authentication required. This forum is indexed by search engines. That's how I found it, scouting-related searches turned up discussion threads here. It's a perpetual adult leader meeting that anyone can walk into.

We will never see the scouts "come into the room" and will never know who heard us here. In a physical room, if a scout suddenly walks in and it's a conversation that's inappropriate for scout ears, everyone stops talking. Here, we just keep going. The difference that matters is can scouts "hear" what's being said. It's not whether it's online or in meat space.

Hopefully he's heard of MBWA or gemba walks.

6 hours ago, fred8033 said:

I'm pretty sure I'm the same person; just not a simple label.

Appreciating this right here is absolutely key to good online conversation. Everyone is a person living their life, occasionally typing stuff to post here. Not a label or a category. In our cases, a scouter doing scout stuff with scouts, too. A fellow member of the scouting movement.

If you wouldn't say something to someone in person, you shouldn't type it, either. The internet doesn't erase speech cause and effect. If you type something hurtful, it's still hurtful. We need to make an extra effort to remember to drop our storylines about people we get to know online if we want to build strong community online. 

"We are a storytelling, storysharing species. This is great because stories are interesting, and they are how we get to know each other. They are how we get to know ourselves and how we make meaning out of our lives.

So, stories are great…until they aren’t.

We are actually SO good at storytelling, we make up stories about things that aren’t really true or there or happening at all. As Brene Brown says, “In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. It’s how we are wired. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Meaning making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect.”

Brown quotes Jonathan Gottschall saying, “Ordinary, mentally healthy people are strikingly prone to confabulate in everyday situations.” Confabulation is to fabricate a story to compensate for a lack of memory. It means we tell lies, but we tell them honestly.

The trouble, then, with this default programming of our brain is that these stories we come up with are often inaccurate, false, and even uncivil. Unfortunately, our brains reward us with dopamine whenever we achieve this recognition of pattern completion (stories are patterns).

So, not only do we make up these storylines to protect ourselves, but we also reward ourselves for the stories we create even when they are blatantly false! Not all of our stories are false, of course, but the ones born out of reactivity and defensiveness certainly are not our friends, nor are they accurate interpretations of reality."

On 4/10/2024 at 2:10 PM, SiouxRanger said:

I am not interested in starting an interminable political debate, just to obtain folks' definitions of "liberal" and whatever the antonym is ("conservative?")

In a US context:

Yes, the antonym is conservative. It used to have one clear meaning, but now I just have the same question you asked when I hear it. "What does that mean to you when you say it?" It has so many effective meanings, as does conservative, that they're both becoming useless for communication unless you know the person using them well enough to know what they mean without asking. Both are used as insults both directly and ironically.

4 hours ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

No, it isn't.

You have no idea who @fred8033 is.  That account could be a Scouter, or it could be someone posing as a Scouter, or it could (these days) be a large language model chatbot posting.  Or it could be one of my alter egos trolling you, and complete fiction.

 

I'm pretty sure the account is a human - not you - for multiple reasons. No, I can't prove it, but Occam's Razor suggests it's a human.

Not taking what accounts post here seriously because they might be someone posing as a scouter, a troll, or a bot will rapidly destroy any semblance of civil and a scoutlike conversation, and we know that because that's what happens on every chan board. The experiment has been run several times and it always ends in something that's completely against several points of the Scout Law and Oath. 

For your point to be true, everyone else on the Internet needs to take the basic position of chan culture, which they don't. This board has all the hallmarks of real humans and will be treated as such by mainstream Internet users.

On 4/9/2024 at 8:02 AM, fred8033 said:

Disposing of those you disagree is wrong.  Some call it censorship.  I call it a form of sin.  People are no more disposable for their beliefs than their sexual orientation.  We all need to work together.  

I asked why the medium matters, this is not a response to what I said and it's a strawman to boot. I agree that it's wrong to dispose of those one does not agree with and that we need to work together. That's not what I'm arguing for. Please don't put words in my mouth.

On 4/9/2024 at 8:02 AM, fred8033 said:

I've always thought it should be obvious that there is a clear difference between forums like this where we discuss and exist for discussion.  In-person working with youth and new leaders is different.  That should be completely obvious.

So, why does the medium matter? You never answered. Why doesn't the presence of the youth matter? Isn't that the difference you're pointing at, really? That you can say certain things to other scouters in private, but not in the presence of youth?

You do realize this forum is the social equivalent of us standing in a town square in our uniforms saying everything we've ever said here every second of every day to anyone who cares to listen, including scouts?

On 4/7/2024 at 11:45 AM, BetterWithCheddar said:

I'm suggesting it's OK for adults to express reservations about membership changes online or in a Zoom meeting, provided it's done in a tactful manner. There is no need to "crack down" on them unless their comments target specific youth members or are deliberately hurtful. If you feel a youth in your area has been treated unfairly, by all means intervene on their behalf.  Scouting would not exist in some communities today were it not for some of these "old school" scout leaders. Change takes time and I'm not sure you can get there by extinguishing dissent.

I don't know that there's a tactful way to say "your presence here is bad/unwanted". You can deliver it with more or less polish, but "you should be kicked out of this organization" is a fundamentally unfriendly message. Allowing scouts and scouters to tell scouts they shouldn't be in scouting is not a good idea. It creates all kinds of problems in the long run, for both individual scouts and the organization as a whole. Even if the comments aren't targeting a specific youth member, it undermines our value foundation (you only really need to treat some scouts in a friendly and helpful manner) and so puts our reputation in question on that same point again.

And why would the medium in which the opinion is expressed matter? Why would something be ok to say on a Zoom or online but not in person?

Scouters who do think that BSA should change membership policy to exclude some scouts are certainly free to express that opinion as long as nobody affected by such a proposed policy change hears it. I mean... What would be the effect of allowing people to question the wisdom of allowing black scouts, Jewish scouts, Muslim scouts, Latino scouts, lower-class scouts, etc, in earshot of the scouts that would be affected and scouters who once were those scouts? It's "just asking questions" passive aggressive. That's not the same as scouters discussing it in private. There I agree with you. But this isn't private. It's in scout earshot.

I don't care so much about whether people who want girls and LGBTQIA+ scouts out of BSA change their minds, because whoever hasn't changed their mind at this point probably isn't going to. I care if they get in the way of scouts scouting.

Certainly, there are a lot of people who have served scouting for many years who have a problem with some scouts being in the program. They deserve many thanks and respect for what they've done for scouting. But that doesn't mean they can break the scout law now thanks to their long service. You can be grateful to someone and disapprove of specific things that they do at the same time. 

1 hour ago, BetterWithCheddar said:

Change takes time. If you want people to embrace it, they need to feel like they have some control over their change. In the long run, it's better to earn respect than have it legislated.

As a teenager, I thought homosexuality was a morally grey area - then I actually met a few gay people and realized "oh, if so and so is gay, it can't be that bad." A few years ago, I hired someone who happened to be gay. They turned out to be the best direct report I've ever had. My opinion of them is sky high. Today, I would wear a rainbow t-shirt and march in a parade with them if they asked.

Had I seen more PowerPoints and pamphlets in my youth, I doubt I would have arrived at this level of acceptance / advocacy any faster. 🙂

 

I'm not sure I understood you correctly. It sounds to me like you're saying that we should let scouts and scouters break any and all parts of the scout law as long as they're experiencing change that's hard for them personally. If scouts are being unkind, unfriendly, etc towards other scouts, then it's on the scouts being targeted to "earn respect" from the aggressors and we scouters shouldn't intervene, not even if the aggressor is another scouter? 

Or are you talking about changing why some scouts would choose to bully female and LGBTQIA+ scouts, but not actually the question of what to do about the YPT violations their choices lead to?

3 hours ago, Armymutt said:

There are lots of boy units who have the exact same problem, especially in the inner city, like Charlotte where that council is located.  You would think that they would open it to all new troops.  Might be a great way to get boys off the streets and into the woods.  

Some of the phrasings made me think there's also a hostile culture problem in boy units towards girl units, but I would think newly formed units ought to have less of that if that is indeed the case. And if it is, I think it's totally appropriate to kick disruptive and disrespectful units out. Scout law violations are always a problem to deal with. Girls should absolutely not need shielding from boys; something has gone quite awry if they do.

I have to take back my outrage at that specific girls-only camporee. Just in case there was some additional context, I reached out to the organizer, and it turns out that the camporee is there to solve the problem of weak scoutcraft experience among both scouts and leaders. 

I had most of the facts, I just didn't put them together in a way to predict the problem because of my own scouting and family backpacking experience, including my current scouting involvement in a family pack with family dens where girls and boys learn the exact same scoutcraft skills, hike the same miles, set up the same tents, cook the same camp food, fish the same river, etc. I have so many memories of girls and boys together doing scouty stuff that I failed to imagine that the older girls who join Scouts BSA by and large didn't have scouting or personal outdoors life experience, because it's only been five years since girls have been allowed to join. I assumed that the girls who joined came in with that experience, but they didn't, at least not in that council. 

To make the lots-of-new-scouts problem worse, they got concentrated into girls-only units, many with new leaders who also didn't have scouting and apparently often outdoors life experience. In that council, many packs are still boys only (restricting the crossover pipeline for girls) and several charter partners refuse to charter girls units outright, so the membership growth in girls has been slower than they expected. Rather than the usual timeline of  join a troop in late winter to be comfortable going to summer camp with the troop that summer, the girls apparently tend to join in August - after summer camp - often with no previous camping experience whatsoever. So, they scheduled the camporee to be a 'soft landing' for girls who join in fall to learn core scoutcraft skills as well as leader training for things that we in mixed or boys' units mostly learn from watching it be done by others, like How to Hold A Board of Review and How to Be A Merit Badge Counselor, and Troop Committee Training. Based on the feedback, it seems effective both in teaching as well as getting the new scouts hooked on scouting.

So, my take is that the girls-only camporee is solving the problem of ensuring quality in units a lot of new scouts with brand new leaders, which is in large part created by requiring girls and boys to be in separate units. If the girls had been able to join existing units, this problem would have been solved organically, but because they weren't there was a training need, which the camporee is filling.

I initially thought the purpose of the camporee was a bit like the hogging of the good bathroom, but that's not the case. My bad.

14 hours ago, qwazse said:

@AwakeEnergyScouter As I became an older scout, I got the impression that other boys did not always get the same experience. I later met many men my age who describe their scouting experience as being boring or inequitable because their troop "didn't do that much" in terms of living adventurously. It seemed that they were "over sheltered" or the SM made things so simple for them that the experience was trivial. That should be a cautionary tale for us all.

Thanks for sharing! I've heard this about GSUSA, but that it happens in BSA also was new to me. Indeed, a cautionary tale! Any troop that craves amenities may have a culture problem, irrespective of gender.