Eat more Cookies: with Pride
If you haven’t already broken your New Year’s resolution: time to do it by buying box loads of Girl Scout cookies. A group calling itself HonestGirlScouts.com is calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies because the Colorado chapter of the scouts has admitted a transgender child as a scout. The age of this terrible degenerate child out to destroy the purity of the girl scouts? Seven.
Bobby Montoya from Colorado, the seven year old in question, had always felt that her body was great except she had “boy parts”. Bobby herself is fine with being a girl with “boy parts” and so is her mother. Like any other child of this age Bobby likes toys, clothes and, like a lot of girls, also wants to be a Girl Scout.
A lot of people are not fine with Bobby’s dangerous desire to knock on your door with a box of cookies or worse still, visit nursing homes.
If you think the life of a seven year old is all mindless running around with little thought except for the next PBJ, watch this video of Bobby speaking out. Bobby does not have an easy time at school. She is bullied for her choices and the way she acts. But she was really heartbroken when her local Girl Scout leader rejected her application to be a member of the group, because, again, she had “boy parts”.
Fortunately for Bobby and for the rest of us who think we are past the 1600s, the Girl Scouts reversed their earlier rejection and admitted Bobby as a Scout.
And then everyone lived happily ever after.
Except the bigots.
Who have now organized a campaign against the Girl Scout’s decision, on grounds that “real” girls will not “feel safe” if the organization admits boys.
Bigots have a place of pride in the Scouts’ movement. The founder Baden Powel got inspiration to found the scouts from using 12-15 year old boys in the Siege of Mafeking during the Boer War in South Africa. From this honorable principle of using children to defend imperialism, Baden Powel went on to find delight and inspiration in that other child-friendly piece of literature: Mein Kampf. In 1939 he noted in his diary: "Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organization etc”
The policy makers at Boy scouts in America—not necessarily the boys and their parents--have closely followed certain aspects of their founder’s politics. The Boy Scouts do not allow atheists, agnostics, or “avowed” homosexuals to be in leadership positions in the organization. The real obscenity is that several state and federal courts have let them get away with such openly discriminatory and hateful policies. In 2004 they made a public declaration of their bigotry with this statement:
Boy Scouts of America believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed. The conduct of youth members must be in compliance with the Scout Oath and Law, and membership in Boy Scouts of America is contingent upon the willingness to accept Scouting’s values and beliefs…In the unlikely event that an older boy were to hold himself out as homosexual, he would not be able to continue in a youth leadership position
Using children in open armed conflict is honorable and a child declaring their sexuality is not “morally straight”.
Anyone reading this still want to be “straight” in above world?
Given this “honorable” historical context of the Scouts movement, the decision of the Colorado chapter to admit Bobby is a fantastic step and ought be used as precedence. Similarly, the lunatic fringe organization that calls itself the Honest Girl Scouts should not need masks at a Halloween themed parade.
A staunch supporter of the Honest Girls, one Jane Petry, is a sixty-something-year old woman from St. Louis who is a lifer with the Scouts having followed her mother into the organization. She wrote an open letter, available online, protesting the Girl Scouts dangerous tilt to the left in their support of “vulgar” organizations, such as Planned Parenthood.
Go to the facebook page of the First Tea Party Rally in St Louis. Whose name do you see proudly emblazoned in the comment section of the Tea Party’s page? Why--it’s one Jane Smith Petry!
Follow her down to her own facebook page and you will find her learned comments on the importance of being ashamed of yourself in several ingenious ways: about your sexuality, your reproductive choices, the ways in which you might seek to inform yourself of such things and so on.
However, what you will also find on Jane Petry’s page are several comments protesting the world that the Jane Petrys and the Koch brothers want to make. One such comment says:
in statistical likelihood, all of us have several GLBT relatives. I only hope Jane's grow up to love and respect themselves, more than their mother/grandmother, and live happy self-confident lives working towards human civility, instead of hatred.
The seven-year old Bobby Montoya lives in a world where 30-40% of LGBT youth attempt suicide at some point in their life. In some cases, like that of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, they succeed.
But this is also a world where ordinary people defend human dignity and rights.
And as Bobby herself said to her mother: “Mom, you are right. They can't be mean to me. I am a human being like everyone else."
I know you want to: so go get those Girl Scout cookies and share them with the children you know. No matter if they have “boy” or “girl” parts.