Jenny Beth Martin brings this one to the table as a mother, not a commentator. Her son is an Eagle Scout who through-hiked the entire Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine last summer and worked a scout camp as a counselor in college. The piece made her sad, and then it made her angry. Conn Carroll, it turns out, is an Eagle Scout too, and so is his oldest son.
The article he responded to was a New York Times opinion piece arguing that bringing girls into the Boy Scouts had been a tremendous success. The organization is not even called the Boy Scouts of America anymore. It is Scouting America. What Carroll went looking for in the piece, and did not find, was a single line explaining how any of this benefited boys. In the few places boys are mentioned at all, he says, they are dismissed: that boys did not know how to act around girls, so girls had to be brought in to teach them, as if boys are not around girls all day at school. And that the only reason a boy might object is jealousy over girls' achievement.
His argument is about something that has quietly disappeared. There has been a steep decline in the number of spaces for men, and more importantly for boys, to be together as boys, and he does not think the people writing these pieces have any concept of why those spaces matter. Boys need to see what becoming a man looks like without the distraction of hormones and the presence of girls at that age. He tells a story from his own time as an assistant scoutmaster at a scout camp, and the complicated disciplinary aftermath, that makes the point better than any argument.
Jenny Beth Martin takes it from there. The Eagle Scout track is an extraordinary program, and if there should be an equivalent for girls, then build one. What happens when you merge them is that summer camp turns into something else. Her son told her the girls at camp started being flirty with the counselors, which puts an eighteen-year-old counselor in an impossible position inside an organization that has already spent years building two-deep leadership rules precisely so no adult is ever alone with a child.
Carroll's close is the part worth sitting with. Boys deserve the same principle we defend when we say men do not belong in women's sports. And there is one more thing he brings in: his father died when he was young, so what scouting gave him, beyond leadership, was week-long backpacking trips where he could watch other fathers with their sons and model what being a dad actually looked like. You do not get that in a mixed setting.
Call your senators and your representative at 202-224-3121.
Watch the full hour at jennybethshow.com. More at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — An Article That Made Her Sad and Angry
00:20 — Two Eagle Scouts on One Panel
00:32 — What the Op-Ed Actually Celebrated
01:14 — It Never Said How This Helped Boys
01:31 — The Decline of Spaces for Boys to Be Boys
01:49 — Why Gender-Specific Spaces Matter
02:33 — When Summer Camp Becomes Something Else
03:45 — Flirting With the Counselors
04:37 — The Same Principle as Women's Sports
05:05 — Watching Other Fathers, With His Own Gone
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