Speaking of the Boy Scouts...

Since the Boy Scouts came up, let me talk for a minute about the Girl Scouts.

The Girl Scouts used to have a terrific program for girls. Sadly, it didn't employ Leadership as a feature of the program, as the Boy Scouts' program does. That is the essence of the BSA program--leadership. The essence of the GSA program is service. Girls are required to do hours and hours of service for each of the awards leading up to and including the Gold award (and are specifically disallowed from allowing anyone else do their work for them), but they're never required to lead anything.

The boys, by contrast, lead their patrol, perform duties with a title (such as Historian or Scribe) that requires them to ask others to contribute hours ("When you're at the Council office would you mind getting this information for me please?"), or organize others to get things done. The final project, to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout, requires that they organize many people to do a hundred hours total of community service, such as getting someone to acquire a donation of paint, or directing volunteers to send thank-you notes to donors, or coordinating dozens of people in a huge painting or mowing or sandblasting crew on the morning of the effort.

SO... If you want to learn Service, join the GSA. If you want to learn to lead, join the BSA.

Why don't they know this? I keep seeing women of the GSA bemoan the fact that the Gold Award doesn't have the prestige that the Eagle Scout rank holds. But ladies, try to understand the above. Leadership has to be learned through exercising it; service is a whole different issue.

While I'm contrasting the GSA and the BSA, I'd like to mention their politics. Most people don't realize that the GSA leadership has been taken over by feminists. I don't know what Juliette Gordon Low would have thought of this; I always thought she was herself a feminist, but a feminist a hundred years ago was a whole different critter from today's rabid nutcases. Charming little adaptations to "modernity" have been put into the handbooks, from lesbian relations to how to use a condom at age 9. Watch out.

That's why some conservative feminists (yes, there are such things, they're sometimes called "equity feminists" because they don't go stomping around insisting that men and women are the same and the only difference is socially imposed) started the American Heritage Girls with a similar program (why, oh why, couldn't they put in the Leadership training for today's girls?) but without the gender politics and left-wing politics.