In the original 1984 version of the movie Red Dawn, the communist invaders were actively looking for individuals who trained in a paramilitary organization. That was the Boy Scouts of America. Forty years later and the Left has infiltrated them, #Woke them, and broke them.
[M]embership in the Boy Scouts of America from 2019 to 2020—from 1.97 million Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts to 1.12 million—was especially dispiriting. To make matters worse, the Associated Press reports that BSA membership has fallen even further since 2020—to about 762,000. For purposes of comparison, combined enrollment in the BSA—Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts—peaked in 1972 at 6.5 million members and as recently as 1998 was 4.8 million.
The piece at Law and Liberty is worth the read, and it makes some important observations. From cultural shifts away from traditional, straight-Christian values to sexual assault suits, the Scouts were struggling. But their toes weren’t on the ledge until the middle of the last century.
Related: #Woke-Culture Girl Scouts Pissed That Boy Scouts Are Attracting Their Girls
All the things that “people” said made them uncool were #woke, secular-humanist gripes. Wedges that lead a floundering organization to commit suicide.
After decades of litigation brought by atheists and homosexuals regarding the BSA’s exclusionary membership requirements—which were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) as the exercise of the BSA’s First Amendment rights—the BSA reversed itself by allowing gay youths full participation in 2014 and allowing openly gay adults as leaders in 2015. Instead of stemming BSA’s membership decline, the national leadership’s acquiescence to atheists and homosexuals—some believe due to pressure from major corporations whose financial patronage had become indispensable to the organization’s operation—only accelerated it.
The Left’s traditional allies ate out its substance.
Lacking values or any sort to make members exceptional and absent restrictions based on sex (male) or sexual preference (heterosexual) – both upheld by the US Supreme Court back in 2000 – the Boy Scouts’ gave in to the mob, and the mob won.
There may be more than one lesson here, but the only one that matters is this. Nothing the Left champions is for the betterment of anything but the political climate in which Democrats believe they can grow their agenda.
That agenda begins with influence and ends with force. Cultural casualties are the point; collateral damage is an acceptable side-effect.
Even if it’s you.
