Amerika

Recently the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced that it would begin accepting girls and the world lost its mind, but for the wrong reasons. Conservatives blarted on about loss of tradition, and Leftists, as they always do, celebrated another entity lowering its standards in order to be more popular, which is the Leftist modus operandi.

Most of them missed the reality of how long the BSA has been a target and what has actually happened to them: a gradual process of infestation by Leftists, which I call “Wumping” after an influential book that describes the process by which humans, by pursuing individualism, ruin things.

It describes a race of people who are traveling through space, seeking a new planet because their old one has become ruined. When they find a new planet, they set up shop and do the exact same thing they did on the old planet, and soon the new one is ruined too. Then the process repeats, presumably in an infinite loop of destruction.

When we look more deeply into the BSA, we see an organization shattered by Leftism:

The Summit is more than the ultimate Scout camp. It was envisioned as a way to shore up the finances of an organization burdened by a long-term drop in membership, costly sexual-abuse lawsuits and a bruising battle over whether to admit gay members.

…The Summit shortfall is part of a broader financial crunch facing the Boy Scouts as the organization shrinks. That decline has been exacerbated by the protracted gay-membership battle. A compromise adopted by Scout leaders in May – allow gay youth, but not gay adults – appears to be doing little so far to ease the pressure.

Conservative troops are threatening to secede; one splinter group said this week it is forming a rival to the Scouts. Liberal troops are meanwhile establishing more-inclusive policies. Many corporate donors continue to sit on the sidelines, even as some regional Scout councils face severe deficits, according to Boy Scout executives and council members across the country.

What killed them off was pressure from corporate sponsors to be accepting of homosexuals. This went against conventional wisdom that men who like to have sex with other men should not be exposed to young boys, in the same way we generally do not like having men in charge of groups of young girls.

However, in egalitarian parlance, telling anyone that they cannot do something because of specific traits that they have is taboo. We work around this painfully every day. We cannot select a genius for the job, so we set up lots of hoops to jump through and then get inferior candidates under whose poor decisions we all suffer.

While many citizens would find it unfair to tell homosexuals that they cannot work as, say, bank tellers or shelf stockers, most people instinctively know that it is illogical to place people in charge of a group they have interest in. This is why we do not have male attendants in the women’s locker room.

For the BSA, the issue of homosexual scoutmasters and troops threatened their support base, but was also being heavily pushed by corporate interests who now cannot avoid tolerance issues because these groups are mainstream:

Christian churches sponsor a large proportion of Boy Scout troops in the United States, and the national leadership long sought to bar gay scouts and troop masters. That effort culminated in a 2000 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Scouts’ right to exclude “avowed homosexuals.”

The victory proved costly, as some corporate donors cut their funding of the Boy Scouts.

Intel, a longtime backer of local councils, now requires local Scout groups to pledge not to discriminate.

Merck and CVS Caremark stopped giving to the national Boy Scouts organization in recent years.

With donations declining, the BSA caved. This had an immediate effect on middle class Americans. They are familiar with the situation where a company or organization starts making Leftist decisions. Anything that the Left co-opts gets ruined for actual life utility, but of course becomes ideologically compliant.

When the BSA started leaning to the Left on not just homosexuality, but a slew of other issues, middle class Americans sort of rolled their eyes and said, “There goes another one.” They pulled their kids out, stopped paying dues, and moved on to something else. This put the BSA in a tailspin.

In order to stay afloat, they had to find a new audience, and fast. In modern society, this means lowering standards so that more people — instead of just the upper half of middle class well adjusted kids — can participate. That in turn means replacing the useful learning experience activities with fluff and Leftist “teachable moments.”

At that point, the intelligent people leave the organization. Their careers and futures are in the hands of a system out of control, so they head to greener pastures. This leaves only the incompetents, fools, and people hired for political reasons, who proceed to run the business into the ground. This, too, happened at the BSA.

We have seen Wumping before. It happened to the American auto industry. Once unions had legal protection, the sane and competent fled management, leaving only those who were chosen for their ability to work in the chaotic environment created by unions. This replaced a goal of quality with a goal of “working within the system.”

In the 80s the Japanese ate the American auto industry alive by aiming for quality instead of following National Labor Board regulations and union schedules, and so most of those union workers found their careers in jeopardy. This pattern happens time and again, and is why American labor got outsourced and offshored in the 90s.

As the Left has moved into social institutions, such as churches or the Boy Scouts, they are Wumping those. The Boy Scouts organization was designed to make boys into men by taking them out into the woods with other boys and none of the distractions of girls or socializing. There, they learned survival techniques and woodsmanship.

Now it will become another social club. Girls and boys will interact just as they do in school. Boys will not take risks. Most of all, boys will not have a space of their own; the Left hates it when any “privileged” group has something of its own. That explains why they chose this battleground.

With the snowflakes in charge, the BSA death cycle becomes complete. No one will volunteer to work someplace where they can have their good names and careers ruined for using the wrong pronoun. The Leftism encroachment of political language will continue, and soon, the focus of activities will shift from outdoors to political ideology.

Not surprisingly, organizations like Trail Life are growing to fill the void. People still want instruction in manliness, faith, and morality for young men. The BSA will not be providing it, and so it will pass into forgotten history.

Tags: boy scouts, boy scouts of america, teachable moment