scouts

Oh yeah, I mean I'm totally going to clue him into that stuff at some point! It doesn't pay to be ignorant about it. But pretending or faking it would be awful and I don't know if the BSA would recognize "learning about the founding documents of the surrounding culture" as a religion.

I suppose that the next best step is to sound out the local scout leaders myself and see what their take on it is, like Laurel said.

And if they don't let us in, I'll steal their manuals and start my own scout troop.

Luckily, I was in an avowedly sectarian scout org meant for Seventh Day Adventists and I had a smattering of my mother's Catholicism (prob the reason for my atheism) so I could hold my own to a great extent and they didn't have any compunction about preaching to the grubby little heathen savage that I was.

i was in scouts and i was raised nothing; i think i just thought about dinosaurs or doodled when we had to listen to people talk about god. don't remember being persecuted or anything but it's probably troop-by-troop and what with the intensified culture wars and everything it's probably different now than it was in the 1990s. anyway, scouts is fun until you get old enough to arrange your own fun, when you should jump ship immediately.

There are horror stories every now and then about a leader who's v militaristic or uses shaming and humiliation to make kids "man up" or it could be as simple as, the group available in your area doesn't do much camping or heavy outdoors stuff.

My brownie/girl scout troops certainly never went camping or made campfires or got pocket knives or did anything fun, we just met at someone's house and sewed things. There was a scout camp with platform tents that some groups went to, but not the one from my small town, run by somebody's mom, which mostly consisted of using up the craft supplies from her basement, afaict.

I was a scout for a long time, made it to eagle and everything, and my guess is that the program's intolerance for things is directly proportional to its degree of religiosity/Christianity. That is to say, if you belong to a troop in a region well known for fundamentalism or conservative Christianity, then the troop will likely reflect that. If you don't, it won't. When I was in scouts, I don't recall encountering any institutional ignorance. Just the usual smatterings of homophobes/racists, etc, that were no more pronounced than at public school in the '80s. And in scouts as in school, I felt it my duty to tell those assholes to shut the fuck up.

That said, my elder girl is asking about Girl Scouts, which I don't know shit about except that I don't want to sell cookies.

Oh really, cause I'd buy them.

Oh really, cause I'd buy them.

huh.