The Boy Scouts of America was dead long before its name change

Of all the memorable experiences I had in the Boy Scouts of America, there is one that I still think about regularly.

I was 13 years old and served as the senior patrol leader and boy leader of the entire force. Our troop was at our annual week-long summer camp and it was just before dinner when all the troops lined up on the parade grounds for the evening colors ceremony.

While most of my troop members waited at our campsite for me to lead them in the march to the parade ground and eat dinner, I was enjoying a three-on-three basketball game with a few boys from other troops. Since I was missing in action and adolescent boys at summer camp eat as if they were half-starved, my deputy chief of patrol stepped in for me and led the troops to the parade ground.

Now the basketball court was right next to the parade ground, so my scoutmaster saw me playing basketball as the troop made its way to the grounds. He walked up to me and, without embarrassing me in front of the troop, reminded me that as senior patrol leader I had certain leadership responsibilities that meant I wasn’t allowed to casually play basketball while the troop was preparing for dinner. When I took on the role of leader of the troop, I had sacrificed the ability to do what I wanted because the other boys trusted me to lead them. That little lesson in leadership, born from a teenager’s short attention span, has stayed with me ever since and showed me how the Boy Scouts of America has helped produce great leaders with strong moral character for a century.

On Tuesday, the Boy Scouts of America announced it was rebranding itself as Scouting America, breaking away from the 114-year tradition that has made it the country’s most respected youth leadership organization in a century. In many ways, this rebranding is the culmination of a decades-long project to transform the organization from a culturally conservative organization to a cesspool of woke ideology.

In a video interview with the Associated PressBSA President Roger Krone said the organization was rebranding because “for the next 100 years, we want every youth in America to feel very, very welcome when they participate in our programs.”

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I received my Eagle Scout Award in 2013, a year before the organization lifted a supposed ban on gay Scouts. In 2015, the organization lifted a ban on gay leaders that had previously been the subject of a Supreme Court case. And in 2018, the Boy Scouts of America abandoned all pretenses of being an organization solely dedicated to training young men to become the leaders of tomorrow as they completely changed the makeup of the organization by allowing girls to participate for the first time.

Today this organization is a shadow of what it once was. Membership has plummeted and widespread allegations of sexual abuse have driven the organization into bankruptcy. Renaming does not cover its failure to live by the values ​​it professes, as this once great organization continues to die a slow and painful death by wokeness.