Boy Scouts of America changes name after 114 years to 'boost inclusion'
Given their track record of child-abuse, normal and well-informed parents would not now send their kids there anyhow. There are various Christian alternatives. The Scouts were once Christian too. Goodness knows what a mixof oddball kids and leaders they are now
The Texas-based organization is set to become Scouting America as it hopes to improve participation amid flagging membership.
The historic change is the latest in a series designed to take the troop into the 21st century, including allowing gay youth and welcoming girls throughout its ranks.
It comes as the organization is emerging from bankruptcy following a flood of sexual abuse claims.
'In the next 100 years we want any youth in America to feel very, very welcome to come into our programs,' Roger Krone, who took over last fall as president and chief executive officer, said in an interview before the announcement.
The announcement came at its annual meeting in Florida on the fifth anniversary of the organization welcoming girls into Cub Scouting.
Boy Scouts of America began allowing gay youth in 2013 and ended a blanket ban on gay adult leaders in 2015.
In 2017, it made the historic announcement that girls would be accepted as Cub Scouts as of 2018 and into the flagship Boy Scout program - renamed Scouts BSA - in 2019.
The move has been met with some backlash, with calls to boycott the institution in the same way that Bud Light customers chose to stop supporting the company after they partnered with a transgender influencer.
'Boy Scouts are removing the word boy from their name after 114 years. Now they will be called Scouting America,' one irate X user wrote.
'Bud light them too. Seriously, BUD LIGHT every piece of garbage institution in this country that is doing everything they can to tear down and torch our culture, our traditions, common sense, biology, and our way of life.'
'"Everyone can be their authentic self and they will be welcomed here" This is antithetical to Boy Scouts,' another fumed.
'The boy is to be shaped by scouting, HE should change, that's the point. Not the other way around. This is little more than a humiliation ritual.'
Radio presenter Dana Loesch pointed out that a separate organization for Girl Scouts already exists.
There were nearly 1,000 young women in the inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts in 2021, including Selby Chipman.
The all-girls troop she was a founding member of in her hometown of Oak Ridge, North Carolina, has grown from five girls to nearly 50, and she thinks the name change will encourage even more girls to realize they can join.
'Girls were like: `You can join Boy Scouts of America?´' said Chipman, now a 20-year-old college student and assistant scoutmaster of her troop.
Within days of the announcement that girls would be allowed, Bob Brady went to work.
A father of two girls and a proud Eagle Scout himself, the New Jersey attorney eagerly formed an all-girls troop.
At their first weekend gathering with other troops, the boys were happy to have the girls involved but some adult leaders seemed concerned, he recalled.
Their worries seemed to melt away as soon as the girls led a traditional cheer around the campfire.
'You could see a change in the attitude of some of the doubters who weren´t sure and they realized, wait, these kids are exactly the same, they just happen to have ponytails,' said Brady.
His daughters are among the 13 girls in his troop and 6,000 girls nationwide who have achieved the vaunted Eagle Scout rank.
Like other organizations, the scouts lost members during the pandemic, when participation was difficult.
After a highpoint over the last decade of over 2 million members in 2018, the organization currently services just over 1 million youths, including more than 176,000 girls and young women. Membership peaked in 1972 at almost 5 million.
The move by the Boy Scouts to accept girls throughout their ranks strained a bond with the Girl Scouts of the USA, which sued, saying it created marketplace confusion and damaged their recruitment efforts.
They reached a settlement agreement after a judge rejected those claims, saying both groups are free to use words like 'scouts' and 'scouting.'
While camping remains an integral activity for the Boy Scouts, the organization offers something for everyone today, from high adventures to merit badges for robotics and digital technology.
'About anything kids want to do today, they can do in a structured way within the scouting program,' Krone said.
The Boy Scouts´ $2.4 billion bankruptcy reorganization plan took effect last year, allowing the organization to keep operating while compensating the more than 80,000 men who say they were sexually abused as children while scouting.
Angelique Minett, the first woman chairperson of Scouts BSA, is excited about the future of scouting and the engagement from the group's youth council on issues ranging from sustainability to the fit on some of the uniforms.
'When we think scouts we think knots and camping, but those are a means to an end,' Minett said.
'We are actually teaching kids a much bigger thing. We are teaching them how to have grit, and we´re teaching them life skills and we´re teaching them how to be good leaders.'
The organization won't officially become Scouting America until February 8, 2025, the organization's 115th birthday. But Krone said he expects people will start immediately using the name.
'It sends this really strong message to everyone in America that they can come to this program, they can bring their authentic self, they can be who they are and they will be welcomed here,' he said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13392279/Boy-Scouts-America-changes-inclusion.html
*************************************************I’m about to turn 90, and I didn’t want to give up my licence. One moment changed my mind
I sympathize with this. I gave up driving shortly after I turned 80 and I am glad of it. I am pretty un-co-ordinated and shaky and I too did not want to be one of the old people who mistakenly hit the accelerator instead of the brake. I now have no fear that I will ever do that. Not driving is a weight off my mind even though I drove for 60 years without once hurting myself or anyone else. That record will now stand. Fortunately, I have a wonderful carer who makes that decision easy. A long time ago I made life easy for her so she now is happy to make life easy for me
As someone about to turn 90, driving has been an important part of my life for more than 70 years. I have regularly tested my skills in courses at the RACV, and I am quite well with no health issues. There was no reason to think my time behind the wheel should come to an end, or so I thought.
I’ve driven across much of Australia and around a countless number of Victoria’s marvellous little towns. Each of my cars over the years – a GT Ford, Holdens, a Simca and my very first car, a Raleigh – have been my right-hand man, there to help me whether I needed to pick up life’s essentials, simply get out of the house, or transport the kids and then grandkids around. (One thing I’ve learnt is that if you want to know what is going on in a teenager’s life, there is no better way than to put one on the back seat of a car with two of their friends and take them for a long drive.)
And yet, I’ve made the heartbreaking decision to give up driving, and to sell my car. I respect driving too much, and I too well understand the responsibilities that go with controlling your own weapon of mass destruction.
I was 17 when my car enthusiast boyfriend took me to Bathurst, where he taught me how to drive on Mount Panorama. He really put me through my paces. When I came back to Melbourne and passed my driver’s test my examiner said he wished more people had my control of a vehicle – a story that I dined out on for many years afterwards!
I’m convinced those skills saved my life. Some years later I was driving under a bridge when a semi-trailer came barrelling through on the wrong side of the road. If I hadn’t had the reflexes to take evasive action in that moment, I would have been flattened.
But I’m haunted by a more recent encounter. I was returning home from shopping and about to turn right at an intersection when something, I’m not sure what, stopped me. I looked around and saw through my side mirror a young boy crossing the road. I immediately realised that I had completely failed to see him and if I hadn’t stopped, I would have hit him. My peripheral vision was not working properly, which was why I hadn’t seen him until the very last moment.
I drove through the intersection when it was safe to do so and parked a little way down the road to settle down, as I was shaking with the shock of such a close call. Throughout the rest of the day I could think of nothing else but that boy carrying his backpack, doing absolutely nothing wrong as he walked home from school, and how easily I could have hit him and destroyed his life.
I immediately made the decision to quit driving. To resist any temptation, I sold my car. It was hard to accept. As my friend drove my cute little 2004 Mazda 2 out of my driveway I cried my eyes out.
Last week I read about the shocking numbers of accidents being caused by elderly drivers. Not long ago, I had believed I could keep driving, but I was wrong.
Someone was watching out for me and that boy that day. I’m now convinced it should be mandatory for the elderly to have their driving ability tested from the age of 75. Like a car, your body wears out, and there are no spare parts.
I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever and yet, this decision has been hard to deal with. I can’t go anywhere by myself. At times, I feel I am virtually confined to home. I need to ask for help to go anywhere and while family and friends have congratulated me for my courage, I’ve had to sacrifice my independence.
While nobody wants to give up their keys, I had long been confident I would not be one of those people whose days of driving come to an end because they put their foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and crash through the front of a shop.
But too many people don’t realise that driving a car is much more than just about looking after yourself. You have a responsibility to look after all the other people on the road, whether they be drivers, passengers, cyclists or pedestrians.
To all those elderly people who think they’re OK to keep driving as their skills diminish, I ask them to have a rethink. Yes, giving up your licence is hard to do, and diminishes your independence, but I can now sleep at night knowing I’ve done the right thing.
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Could age verification for porn actually work?
I think the answer is a clear No. Censorship of various sorts is already widely practiced by the Left and people have got used to evading it -- by VPNs and other means. And if a kid is not up to evading it themselves a smarter classmate will be able -- and will enjoy the prestige of sharing that wisdom and its product
In a way, it's weird that it's taken this long for age verification to catch fire in Australian politics.
Stopping literal children from accessing porn online, something they're not actually allowed to do anyway, seems like a slam dunk for any politician within cooee of Australia's mythic political centre — somewhere above sausage sizzles and below kissing babies.
The fact that it did take until May (May!) in 2024 is incontrovertible proof that it's not as easy as it sounds.
Still, here we are, standing on the brink of a pilot for age verification technology, which will receive $6.5 million in next week's federal budget.
Coalition push to trial social media block for children
The federal opposition urges the government to trial age verification schemes that would lock children out of social media platforms, as X's feud with Australia escalates.
It's a very similar proposal to the one contained in a November 2023 private members bill from the Coalition's communications spokesman, David Coleman, who has now been restricted to complaining about a "baffling" delay.
So far, the main difference seems to be that the Coalition was offering a fraction more money — $200,000 — but there's otherwise not much observable daylight between them.
On their similarities, both proposals can be traced back to the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who recommended a pilot like this back in March 2023 as part of her roadmap towards mandating age verification for online porn.
It took the government five months to respond with a longer version of the answer: "not yet".
At the time, Labor was citing the commission's advice that the technology was "immature", saying "the roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not ready to be taken".
Tech years are a bit like dog years though, and a lot can happen in 11 months. So in February 2024, when the eSafety Commissioner was asked at Senate Estimates whether there were any technological barriers to the pilot going ahead, she replied: "No. None whatsoever."
"The age assurance industry is maturing … I think the time is right now that we all move forward," she said.
So how could a porn website reliably check a person's age?
In its roadmap, the eSafety Commissioner recommended a "double-blind tokenised approach".
As the name suggests, the system would involve anonymised digital tokens, issued by a third-party provider accredited to securely receive and verify personal data.
The token could then be presented as proof of age without a person ever having to hand over personal information to the porn site.
It sounds simple enough, but tech barriers are only the beginning.
The commissioner's roadmap also stated that "at this stage, there is likely no existing regulator or accreditation body that has the … capability to provide all the necessary functions".
Tokens aren't the only way, but at first glance, many of the methods currently on offer seem somewhat riskier for users.
After years of struggling to establish a scheme, the UK passed an "age assurance" law last year, and has made several suggestions to companies:
Allowing banks, mobile providers or credit card providers to confirm a user is over 18
Asking users to upload a photo to the site that is then matched with photo ID, and
Using of facial recognition tech that's trained to assess age.
France and Germany are also making their own attempts.
But a senior public servant in the Department of Communications, Bridget Gannon, told Senate Estimates in February that international experiences "don't provide us with a clear way forward".
Put another way, no one has figured this out yet.
Seven US states have passed similar laws and in the places where they've kicked in, it looks like a whole lot of people are using Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, to dodge them.
"Accessing porn has declined to such an extent that it doesn't look like people have stopped looking at pornography; it looks like they are bypassing the technology," Ms Gannon said — and she didn't just mean children.
In case you haven't done the maths on this yet, age verification laws would also affect the millions of Australian adults who legally access porn online.
Under an Australian scheme, every one of them would be asked to participate, and it doesn't take an expert to point out the gargantuan data honeypot that might be created in the process.
As Ms Gannon told Senate Estimates, any scheme will need to "consider Australians' willingness to participate".
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Sydney’s Cumberland Council courts Anti-Discrimination Act over same-sex book ban
But because Muslims want it, it will probably stay. Muslims matter a lot more than Christians
Western Sydney’s Cumberland City Council is at risk of breaking the Anti-Discrimination Act after voting to ban same-sex parenting books in its libraries.
The ban will affect eight libraries across the LGA and was put forward by city councillor and former Cumberland City mayor Steve Christou.
He alleged that parents were “distraught” upon seeing the book Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig in libraries.
Mr Christou spoke to Channel 9 on Wednesday, arguing that the parenting books were “sexualised” and that the ban was an effort to “let kids be kids”.
“You have to understand that at Cumberland City Council, about 60 per cent of the community was born overseas and they have deep conservative values, family values and religious values, it doesn’t matter whether they’re Christian, Catholic, Orthodox, Islamic or Hindu,” Mr Christou said.
“We’ve had consistent complaints on these kinds of books and similar issues infiltrating our libraries from local residents.
“Our community doesn’t want any form of sexualised books or our kids being opened up to any form of sexualisation in the libraries.
“Let kids be kids, they are innocent, let them enjoy reading a book.”
The NSW government has warned that this vote may be in breach of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act, with a potential funding pull at the relevant libraries threatened.
Auburn MP Lynda Voltz has reportedly passed on the matter to NSW Arts Minister John Graham for review.
“If the government wants to take away funding from one of the most socially disadvantaged communities in NSW because their democratically elected council stood up for the values which they believe represents their local community, well shame on them,” Mr Christou said.
‘I would urge them not to do that.”
In January, Mr Christou said he would ban Welcome to Country ceremonies in Western Sydney. A month later he called for a ban on drag story time sessions in the council area.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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