The closer we move to one gender, as far-left Democrats would have us move, the less we have to worry about sexual abuse against young ladies.
That makes sense, right? We’re all in this together, no differences among us.
But that’s not the way gender confusion works, and it’s not the way it’s working right now for the once-proud group formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America, whose new practices come with great risk.
John Stemberger knows.
He’s the founder of Trail Life USA, a Christian scouting organization that is ready to grab the baton dropped by the Boy Scouts.
The first U.S. Scout troop was started in 1910.
The idea of “scout” troops to teach boys to become men by instilling traits like honor, courage, dependability, and loyalty actually began in Great Britain in 1908.
Those are important lessons. What’s missing is faith, and without faith, those traits can blend until they’re unrecognizable.
Kind of like what some folks – including the boys group formerly known as Boy Scouts – are doing with gender.
The Boy Scouts – who announced in May they will become “Scouting USA” in February 2025 – once stood strong in opposition to homosexuals within their organization. That doesn’t mean opposition to homosexuals overall, end of sentence. You can separate without hate.
Scouts once taught that “homosexual conduct is not morally straight” and did not “promote homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior,” according to a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that actually backed them up.
Its values have changed this century despite that ruling which said the Scouts could continue to exclude gays on the basis of the organization’s self-stated mission.
"We accept the Boy Scouts' assertion," former Chief Justice William Rhenquist wrote for the majority then. Yet the Boy Scouts lifted their ban on gays in 2015 amid its march to cultural inclusivity.
That’s not what’s happening with Trail Life USA.
“Folks need to put their kids in Trail Life USA. Churches are sponsoring these groups. It’s a remarkable Christian scouting program,” Stemberger told show host Tony Perkins on a recent edition of the Washington Watch program.
Before John Stemberger earned a law degree from Samford, before he lobbied for pro-life groups in Florida, and before he advised state, federal, and presidential campaigns, he was a Boy Scout. Not just a regular scout, an elite one, an Eagle Scout who would become a Scoutmaster.
So, while Stemberger became the founding Chairman of the Board for Trail Life USA in 2013, he watches the breakdown of the Boy Scouts with sadness in his heart.
“It's sad because what they've done is they've neutered the DNA of who they were as an organization. We've transformed it to kind of a youth group with neckerchiefs without any core meaning,” he said.
While the Scouts have struggled with their feelings Trail Life’s numbers have ballooned to more than 1,200 troops and 60,000 members, Stemberger said.
The numbers scream, “This is not OK.” Separation of the genders is not wrong.
Gender-based discrimination is wrong, and Title IX spent decades addressing that, but each gender going to its own space at the end of the day – or perhaps a shared space for a married man and woman – is not wrong.
Those separate spaces act as protection.
Now the Boy Scouts, who two decades ago championed values, are willing to subject young girls to rape.
If the girls were a part of Girl Scouts, well, that’s another measure of protection – and another topic.
The new reality has dangerous potential.
" Nobody's talking about this, but all these changes are producing more boy-on-boy and now girl-on-boy sexual contact. Even at the World Jamboree, just a couple of years ago in West Virginia, they had a requirement to readily hand out condoms all throughout the campground. There were girls there as young as 14 years of age. Even alcohol was served in some venues. Imagine that. This was a World Jamboree for the Boy Scouts of America. This is insanity that they're doing this, but this is exactly what's happening. It's a scandal," he said.
Sadly, separating the genders wouldn’t solve the potential for sexual predators.
The Scouts' focus on inclusivity comes in spite of strides made in dealing with sexual abuse within its ranks. In 2021, more than two decades after the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the organizations values at the time, Boy Scouts of America reached an $850 million settlement in a lawsuit that included more than 84,000 claimants.
According to Stemberger, the new way of thinking within the Scouts isn't helping things.
"They have $2.4 billion in a trust fund to settle all these cases," he noted. " It's still going on because they're basically allowing openly gay young men who are attracted to other boys to camp with other boys. That's exactly what's happening here because they do not separate out kids who claim to be openly gay.”
(Editor's Note: Click HERE for an article related to this blog written by Parrish for American Family News.)
