Taking on the Girl Scouts…
My wife is a silver award Girl Scout. My sister was involved for some years too. Of late, the Girls Scouts of America has been waxing more and more liberal, morally relativistic, anti-Christian, and anti-life (as evidenced by their partnering with Planned Parenthood for some sort of sex-ed programming.) Seeing as I have a daughter (only 2 years old so far) we’ve occasionally approached this subject, and my wife has said that it’s ultimately up to the local leader what gets propagated out to the girls. I respond with a question of, “but are you willing to be associated with what goes on at the national level and are you willing to financially support it?”
Background – I knew a leader who was taken aback when there were borderline femi-nazi messages on the Girl Scout Cookies boxes one year. In one of them, there was a little profile of a visit to a science lab of some sort by a group of girls, and a female scientist had hosted them on the visit. Stuck in the middle of the narrative was the line “Dr. XX said it’s not true that girls can’t be good at science.” On another box, the profile was of a group of girls who had gone mountain biking, and at the end of the narrative, it said, “the best part was when we raced down a hill and left a group of boys in the dust.”
At face value, nothing’s wrong with these statements, but think of the context. Rather than simply profile the events and frame them in the positive, there’s a need to introduce a gender battle into the middle of it, I would argue unnecessarily. The leader was so disturbed by these messages and the feminist agenda built into some of the materials she received from the organization that she wrote a letter to higher-ups. They responded essentially that they weren’t interested in having leaders who disagreed philosophically with the organization. As you can imagine, this leader was not a leader much longer.
Well, yesterday on EWTN radio’s Open Line program, host Barbara McGuigen took on the organization for the full hour, systematically explaining why it’s a good time to find other organizations for our daughters to be involved in. It’s 55 minutes long, but well worth the listen. Put it in your iPod or something.
Posted in Catholic Moral Teaching, Personal Musings | 
6 Comments »
April 25th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
[...] I’ve long been convinced that the upper echelons of the Girl Scouts has been infiltrated and taken over by radical feminists. Chris at Roman Catholic By Choice blog has a piece on this subject. Background – I knew a leader who was taken aback when there were borderline femi-nazi messages on the Girl Scout Cookies boxes one year. In one of them, there was a little profile of a visit to a science lab of some sort by a group of girls, and a female scientist had hosted them on the visit. Stuck in the middle of the narrative was the line “Dr. XX said it’s not true that girls can’t be good at science.” On another box, the profile was of a group of girls who had gone mountain biking, and at the end of the narrative, it said, “the best part was when we raced down a hill and left a group of boys in the dust.” [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Thanks, I will make sure I download this.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Wow, it is crazy that you remember those cookie boxes from 1992!
I hate supporting the Girls Scouts financially, but I gotta have those cookies.
I don’t know if little Foreman will be a Girl Scout or not. Probably not.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:56 am
About twelve years ago, a group of disenchanted Girl Scout leaders in the Cincinnati area formed “The American Heritage Girls.” More information can be found on their website:
http://www.ahgonline.org/
April 26th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
In the EWTN audio, the founder of the American Heritage Girls calls in to discuss why she left GSA. Comments are also made about the Catholic organization called The Little Flowers (don’t know much about them, but I assume their patroness is St. Therese of Liseux).
May 1st, 2007 at 6:35 am
Scouting transformed me from a shy, awkward girl into a confident young woman. It gave me so many opportunities to do things I didn’t think I could do: build a fire, lead a group of my peers, train horses. But the organization started to turn in the 1990s and it hasn’t been the same since. I’ll never forget how betrayed I felt when GSA sold National Center West. They didn’t tell us they were going to do it, nor did they say how much money they got or what they used it for. They also replaced many of the confidence-building badge requirements with pseudo-self-esteem exercises: Don’t actually build a fire, girls, because that’s dangerous. Instead, write in your journal about how bad men use fire to destroy the Amazon rainforest. Blech. Thanks for the tip on Little Flowers; I was thinking I might have to start an organization from scratch for my 6-year-old to join.