There’s no real point in recounting a story that’s been all over social media since yesterday. We all know the President told a lurid story to to the Boy Scouts of America who were gathered at their annual Jamboree, turning his opportunity to inspire young America into a deeply weird political rally. Regardless of one’s political leanings, nobody needs an opinion columnist to tell them that’s uncommonly bad form, even for this Chief Exec. But there’s another question we already know the answer to that may be worth asking: Why didn’t somebody cut Trump’s mic?
I know — “You don’t cut the mic on the leader of the free world, it’s just not done, ever.” Undeniably true. Then again, a lot of things just aren’t done, ever. Like using the fine young men of the BSA as political props. Only, that IS done, I suppose, and maybe more often than folks realize. I can share at least one example in the form of this video from Memphis’ first Tea Party where conservative Mid-Southerners sporting anti-immigrant signs and pictures of former President Obama with bullet holes in his face, got themselves good and radicalized.
When Boy Scouts are Political Props
4/15/09
I’m not offering this as any kind of evidence that the BSA is overtly political — I know too many Lefty Eagle Scouts who’ve kept themselves physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. But for anybody wondering why the scouts cheered Trump’s political message, there’s plenty of not-so-ancient history to consider.
Scouting of all kinds took a membership nosedive during the 1970’s. Girl Scouts USA reversed that trend, while the BSA continued to lope forward, declining all the while. Why? University of British Columbia political science professor Barbara Arneil may be on to something:
“A younger civil rights generation, informed by a new set of post-materialist values, did not join traditional organizations like the BSA and GSUSA because their values were deemed to be outdated. The challenge for traditional organizations therefore was how to respond. Using path dependency theory, I argue that BSA and GSUSA—shaped by their own unique origins and identities—responded very differently to the critical juncture of the civil rights generation, which in turn explains the subsequent divergence in membership patterns from the 1980s onward. While the BSA rejects such changes in order to defend traditional values, the GSUSA, which established a commitment to challenging gender norms from its birth, embraces the new values and adapts virtually every aspect of its organizational identity to this new generation.”
In spite of its melting-pot image, the BSA’s history of racial justice has ranged from spotty to poor. The organization only reversed policies allowing discrimination/segregation in the middle-1970’s, and only because they found themselves on the losing end of legal action. Signs of progress appeared in 2015 when the BSA appointed its first Chief Diversity officer and just this year the BSA reversed a century-long ban of transgendered scouts. That doesn’t add up to welcoming, and one has to believe that, all real exceptions and exceptional leaders considered, the organization’s dug heels, and hard fought battles against acceptance and diversity, have shaped membership and culture.
#notallscouts, of course. And #notallscoutleaders, obviously. But there’s a reason why the kids cheered the immoral President, and nobody cut his mic that has nothing at all to do with decorum. This moment wasn’t an anomaly as the BSA’s subsequent press release suggests. It was a culmination.
