Talk:Boy Scouts of America

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Aims and purposes

Under that section the article says: Despite the extremely conservative nature of the group, there are many valuable lessons to be learned for a kid who has a strong counterweight to preserve balance on the political side.

What does this actually mean?--Weirdstuff (talk) 20:32, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Beats me. Aside from filling out papaerwork I learned that teamwork never works and that anything left up to a group to decide will always be a colossal failure unless rigid guidelines are in place. statement^word 20:38, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps it's some kind of code?--Weirdstuff (talk) 13:46, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

It's a bit guffy. I know there are great things in scouting to be experienced, but perhaps whoever wrote that line couldn't quite bring themselves to support the organisation in that way. ^postate 13:45, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Philmont is nice, Northern Tier is pretty fucking awesome. The normal run-of-the-mill stuff? Tedious and boring. Evil fascist^{oh noez} 14:33, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

The only thing I can think of is like, ideas of helping old ladies across the street and giving yourself for the good of the community, etc. Helping other people, right now, does not seem to be a conservative value. But I have no idea how many scouts actually act on that value, or if it's in the culture rather than just the stereotype. ±KnightOfTL;DR^{more at 11} 14:37, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Stereotype in my experience. We only did stuff because you have to do a certain amount of service hours to get to the next rank. Evil fascist^{oh noez} 14:40, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

So basically it's a publicity problem: their image is formed by their supposed values but those values are not followed by their actual culture. That deserves a mention, methinks.±KnightOfTL;DR^{going galt: the literal crazy train} 14:46, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Again, that is how it is here. Here is pretty fucked up, perhaps we can see if anyone else here's city was like this. Evil fascist^{oh noez} 14:50, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Why I don't buy the "BSoA's anti-gay stance is a recent trend" argument

The problem is that what's being presented is not actually a "don't ask, don't tell"-policy, but a remainder of a general prudishness about sex. It's not that Mormons or whoever highjacked the scouting movement, but that its extremely conservative sexual morals discouraged any talk about sex, and when it was finally changed it was to specifically discourage only homosexuality.

I thing that BSA Today captures it quite well:

"But as the organization rededicated itself to whittling and knot-tying, it also began to orient itself in the contemporary political landscape and to assert itself as a combatant in the culture war. Previously, the Boy Scouts had maintained a decorous silence about sexuality; according to the 1972 Scoutmaster's Handbook, Scoutmasters should "not undertake to instruct Scouts, in any formalized manner, in the subject of sex and family life.... [I]t is not construed to be Scouting's proper area." Some of this was the residual prudishness of the organization's Edwardian founders. But the Boy Scouts also did not want to isolate the more conservative religious denominations that sponsored troops, who (ironically, given their current insistence that the BSA explicitly endorse certain sexual norms) worried that any official BSA position on sexuality would impinge on their own efforts at moral education. So, as with religion and politics, except for a few perfunctory references, the BSA was happy to leave the topic of sex to a boy's parents or clergyman."

Thus, the current description here on RW ("The sad part is that they didn't have any requirement regarding sexuality until the Mormons hijacked it for use as their youth development organization, and scoutmaster handbooks used to explicitly tell scoutmasters that this was not their problem.") simply misses the point. There was no greater tolerance for homosexuality back in the day, but simply a blanket silence about all things sex, partly based on general conservative prudishness, partly because of pandering to the same type of religious conservatives that today's "gay-ban" tries to placate. ScepticWombat (talk) 06:04, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

You may be right. That's not how I remember it being presented to me, but it makes sense. The way I understood it was that the Mormons steadily became a bigger presence throughout the 1970s and then, once they had become the force they are now, specifically pushed the anti-gay stance really hard; as you know, by this point many more segments of society were getting past or already past caring about such things. So we may both be right, in a sense; the larger issues of repressing sexuality were in place, and it happened to be around the time they were going away that the Mormons became so powerful in BSA and pushed through DADT. (Apologies if I'm not clear, my back is absolutely killing me from my work and it's all I can do to even try to think straight) ^{— Unsigned, by: The Blade of the Northern Lights / talk / contribs} 01:31, 27 May 2015‎

So is there such a thing as "mixed" scouts (boys and girls)

Or is just Boy Scouts & Girl Scouts, and never the twain shall meet? Or is it still stuck in 1920? Carpetsmoker (talk) 11:37, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

There's Venturing, But nobody really knows/cares about that. TGW 06:03, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Combine "Order of the Arrow" and "Indian dress-up" sections?

Now that we have both as a section, should we combine them into one? TGW 06:04, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Updating

This article needs updating. We let in girls now. It's just scouts. ^{— Unsigned, by: Doublethink / talk / contribs}

Specifically "Scouting America," if I understand correctly. --Firestar464 (talk) 23:38, 29 May 2024 (UTC)