By Suzanne Bowdey

The last 12 years haven’t been kind to the Boy Scouts — and they have no one to blame but themselves. The organization where future moon walkers and presidents learned the virtues and value of leadership is barely recognizable after walking away from the moral compass it taught to generations of men. Now, rumors are swirling that another unhappy ending is in the works for an institution that’s largely disgraced, bankrupt, woke, unpopular, and on the edge of extinction: its longtime partnership with the U.S. military may be over. 

A memo, leaked by an anonymous source inside the Pentagon, suggests that War Department Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning to cut ties with the scouts, insisting that the 115-year-old organization “no longer supports the future of American boys.” And how could it, considering that the group is no longer about boys at all? After opening its doors to openly gay scouts and scoutmasters in 2013, transgenderism in 2017, and girls in 2018, the group’s radical LGBT makeover was complete. By 2024, when leaders rebranded to Scouting America to be more “inclusive,” there wasn’t a shred of the old legacy left.

At the time, CEO Roger Krone explained that the new name was all part of a strategy to win people back. “Membership is at historic lows. Part of my job is to reduce all the barriers I possibly can for people to accept us as an organization and to join.” He’s right that membership was at historic lows — but not because there were barriers. It was because there weren’t enough. Ever since the BSA’s fatal decision to compromise and embrace this moral free-for-all, the Judeo-Christian ethic that once grounded the group is gone. 

Hegseth, recognizing the demise of the longtime tradition, drafted a letter to Congress (which has yet to be sent) scolding the Scouts for being “genderless” and promoting the worst forms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Worse, he added, the organization is now designed to “attack boy-friendly spaces,” NPR reported based on the documents it obtained. 

It’s the secretary’s desire for the department to stop providing “medical and logistical aid to the National Jamboree” and also bar scouts from meeting at military installations, as they have for decades. As NPR explains, “Congress requires the Pentagon to support the scouting program’s Jamboree, a gathering of thousands of young scouts held every three or four years. The U.S. military lends trucks, ambulances and medical teams, and puts on aviation and skydiving demonstrations, all at no cost to the Scouts. For the military, it’s both a training exercise and an opportunity to recruit highly motivated, civic-minded kids.” But, according to the law, the Secretary of War can “withhold support” if he determines it would be “detrimental to national security.” Hegseth argues that promoting “gender confusion” should disqualify the group, blasting the scouts for abandoning their pledge to “cultivate masculine values.” 

Last year, when he was a Fox News host, the secretary was very critical of the scouts’ moral compromise. “The Boy Scouts has been cratering itself for quite some time,” he observed then. “This is an institution the Left didn’t control.” And the reality is, “They didn’t want to improve it. They wanted to destroy it or dilute it into something that stood for nothing.”

Mission accomplished. 

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who watched with dismay as the scouts surrendered to the pressure of the culture over the last several years, applauded Hegseth’s thinking. “If true, this is a good decision by the Pentagon. You’ll recall that the original purpose of the Boy Scouts was to shape boys into disciplined, virtuous young men,” he posted, “many of whom would later serve their nation in uniform. But beginning in 2013, when the Boy Scouts opened the door to homosexuality, the organization stepped away from the moral compass that had guided it for more than a century. Leaders at the time, including Rex Tillerson, brushed aside the very oath that defined the movement: ‘On my honor I will do my best To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.’”

The decision, Perkins emphasized, “marked a moment of capitulation — an attempt to appease the cultural pressures of the day, from activist groups to the broader cancel-culture environment. In doing so, the Boy Scouts left the trail that had shaped generations of young men. And today, as an institution, they are a shadow of what they once were — lost to history because they abandoned the very principles that gave them purpose.”

For families like John Stemberger’s, where rising to the rank of Eagle Scout was a proud tradition, the death of the once-beloved American organization has been heartbreaking. He doesn’t even recognize the group he sees now. “This is an organization in 2018 at the World Jamboree in West Virginia [that] allowed alcohol and condoms readily available with boys and girls as young as 14 years old,” he told FRC’s Jody Hice on “Washington Watch” Monday. “I don’t know where you grew up in scouting,” he said, “but that sounds like some kind of crazy group orgy to me. That doesn’t sound like a safe and secure environment to put young people into.” In fact, he warned, “This organization is not only not safe, it’s dangerous. And parents need to pull their children out. They allow openly gay boys who are attracted to other boys to sleep with whoever they want to. They allow transgender girls — that is a boy acting out as a girl to be a part of the girls’ unit — to sleep with girls. So there’s no moral code here.”

It’s outrageous, Stemberger reiterated. Like Perkins, he thinks Hegseth’s draft memo is a “step in the right direction,” pointing out that for the last 100 years, “the Boy Scouts, by an act of Congress, has had a special status amongst every other boys organization in the world and the country, over and above everyone else. They’ve even gotten the military to give them hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars of support during these events through national events.” Now that they’re woke, he underscored, “they’ve just become more interested in appeasing the leftist agenda of radicals and less interested in building men into boys, which is what the Boy Scouts are supposed to be doing.”

But fortunately for today’s boys, there is a godly alternative — one that Stemberger was instrumental in founding: Trail Life USA. “Back in the day, I took both my sons out of Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and put them into Trail Life USA. This is a conservative Christian scouting movement. It’s nationwide. There [are] over 1,500 troops in all 50 states.” Some of the best leaders, he points out, came out of the Boy Scouts of America. “They’re trained. This is church- based. There [are] standards, and there [are] codes. … It’s built on adventure, character, and leadership for the boys. … Everything’s built around biblical principles, but it’s not churchy and religious.”

At the Trail Life USA website, he urges, you can see your state and city and find out if you have a troop. If not, you can start one. First, he advises, “You need to find a church organization that can sponsor and anchor the organization. And this church owns and operates it. It just doesn’t give it attic space and say, ‘Okay, meet on our premises.’ We want the church to incorporate the troop into the life of the church, [on] missions trips, for volunteering, whatever they need. But we really need the church. Actively engage with the troop. But you can start your own troop if you find a church that’s willing to sponsor it.”

As for the sad story of the Boy Scouts, which was predictable from their first small surrender, it’s a cautionary tale, Perkins insisted back in 2020. And “that’s the destiny of any Christian who takes the naïve view that the world can be placated,” he cautioned. “It can’t. True love, I Corinthians 13:6 tells us, is truth. It’s being salt and light in a draining, hostile, unforgiving culture. ‘Come out from them and be separate,’ Paul urged, because he understands that in the end, it’s not our sameness with the world that transforms people. It’s our distinction of standing on truth in their midst. That may not be easy,” he admitted, “but, as the Boy Scouts are finding out, it’s a whole lot better than the alternative.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.