The Girl Scouts of America is facing financial woes, bickering over property and questionable pension schemes that have prompted members of congress to call for an investigation of the 101-year-old organization.
Just a year after its centennial celebrations, the Girl Scouts of the USA finds itself in a different sort of squeeze. Its interconnected problems include declining membership and revenues, a dearth of volunteers, rifts between leadership and grass-roots members, a pension plan with a $347 million deficit, and an uproar over efforts by many local councils to sell venerable summer camps.
The tangle of difficulties has prompted one congressman to request an inquiry by the House Ways and Means Committee into the pension liabilities and the sale of camps.
“I am worried that America’s Girl Scouts are now selling cookies to fund pension plans instead of camping,” wrote Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, in a letter last month to the committee chairman.
Compounding the problems are tensions at GSUSA headquarters in New York, where several senior executives have quit or been ousted since Anna Maria Chavez took over as CEO in 2011. Last week, some of the roughly 325 employees there were invited to take early retirement, and Chavez said an unspecified number of layoffs are expected in August.
Back in the 90s, the Girl Scouts veered away from tradition and went with the fashions of the time. They eliminated the oaths to God, embraced sexual diversity and forged partnerships with Planned Parenthood. This book appeared right about when the shift to another guiding philosophy took hold, and probably marks the beginning of the end of the institution.
I suspect the Boy Scouts will follow the same trajectory.
But rather than look at it as a tragedy, I think we ought to have a little perspective. Scouting was founded by an American westerner named Frederick Russell Burnham who brought “Indian style” warfare to Africa, where he engaged in assassinations and espionage for the British empire. His prowess in uncivilized warfare was duly noted by Robert Baden-Powell, a British officer who formalized the scouting code and used Burnham’s techniques to train a force of imperial skirmishers (including child soldiers), and then later went on to bring scouting to the world. Many daring killings and much adventure ensued as the white man conquered and plundered his way through the dark continent.
That politicians and preachers today could talk about scouting as though its origins are godly, clean-cut and wholesome is, quite frankly, hilarious. The origin of scouting has more to do with taking scalps than it does with religion, which couldn’t have been more than an afterthought to the cutthroats applying its principles in the Transvaal.
Also ironic is the fact that the first real scouts upon which the Boy Scouts, and subsequently the Girl Scouts, were modeled were essentially in the employ of the most powerful homosexual of the Victorian era: Cecil Rhodes.
Of course, this isn’t to suggest that scouting “needs to change” or anything like that; just that it’s something of an anachronism and already far removed from its origins. You’ve got to admit that when little girls started selling cookies door to door to support scouting troops it was already over, long before people started marching in gay pride parades in Boy Scout uniforms.
