Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
Part two of a two-part series. Click for Part 1.
November-December 2001 – In Greek mythology, the first woman created by the gods was named Pandora. She unintentionally loosed evil upon the world when she opened a box which contained all the misery with which mankind has since wrestled. The myth has come to symbolize the unintended consequences that actions sometimes set in motion.
For the 2.7 million-member Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), the opening of its own Pandora’s box came in 1980, when the organization changed its guidelines on homosexuality. Opting for a policy of nondiscrimination, the Girl Scouts made clear they would thereafter welcome lesbians, either as scouts or as troop leaders.
Who would have thought that, some 20 years later, Girl Scout President Connie Matsui would be promising an audience of leaders at the White House that the organization would be using the pro-homosexual video That’s A Family! “in our informal education in working with all girls across the country,” calling the film “a wonderful product”? (See AFA Journal, 4/01.)
For GSUSA, Pandora’s box is opening wide, and Christian parents may soon be shocked to discover what is being done in their local council.
Celebrating diversity
A cursory look at the GSUSA website, of course, finds nothing but sugar and spice and everything nice. For example, one of the core values embraced by GSUSA is diversity. In the section of its website entitled “Pluralism/Diversity” – written to member girls, and not simply adult leaders – the organization states that a girl “who cannot celebrate differences and be adaptive to change, will not have the strength of character or the understanding and leadership ability needed to succeed beyond her own small community.”
It is certainly admirable to teach young girls to respect differences – that is, to understand that differences exist, and that people have a right to their own views. However, it is something else entirely to push the celebration of those differences, by coercing girls to embrace the difference itself as valid.
Yet pushing the celebration of diversity is exactly what the Girl Scouts do. In the collective mind of the Girl Scout leadership, a girl’s character and leadership ability requires that she “celebrate differences and be adaptive to change.”
However, it is clear that GSUSA does not celebrate all differences, as revealed by a quick look at the links maintained on the Girl Scout website to the sites of other organizations. For example, from the “Diversity” section of the GSUSA site, a youngster can go directly to the “101 Ways You Can Beat Prejudice” page of the Anti-Defamation League; the “Teaching Tolerance” page of the Southern Poverty Law Center; or the “Many Faces/Many Voices” section of the PBS website. At each website, the refusal to accept the homosexual lifestyle as legitimate is explicitly linked to ignorance, prejudice, and hatred.
Perhaps in an attempt to put a shine on this apple, the GSUSA website has the following disclaimer under its section containing these links: “Neither the Girl Scouts of the USA nor its councils are responsible for the content of any other site linked to this one. The inclusion of any link to such a site does not create or imply any approval or endorsement of that site by GSUSA or its councils.”
Such a disclaimer rings hollow, however. After all, there is no link provided to AFA’s website, or those of Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, the Southern Baptist Convention, or any other group with a contrary view. Links are provided only to websites that favor the normalization of homosexuality. So much for celebrating differences.
Celebrating homosexuality
Still, the Girl Scouts insist in their official policy that they are not advancing homosexuality, merely that the Girl Scout organization does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. “[W]e do not endorse any particular lifestyle,” GSUSA says, and “we don’t permit the advocacy or promotion of a personal lifestyle or sexual orientation. These are private matters for girls and their families to address.”
This certainly stretches one’s credulity. After all, if diversity includes homosexuality, and GSUSA celebrates diversity, then GSUSA celebrates homosexuality.
To be fair, turning a blind eye to the sexual orientation of Girl Scouts or adult troop leaders is not necessarily the same as “advocacy or promotion” of homosexuality. But is it true that questions about homosexuality are considered by GSUSA to be a “private matter for girls and their families to address”? Is there any “advocacy or promotion” of homosexuality occurring in local councils bearing the Girl Scout name and, presumably, having the blessing of the national organization?
Sadly, there are. According to an article in the journal Nonprofit Management & Leadership last year, about 13% of local Girl Scout councils – roughly one in eight – have taken the overt step of changing their membership policies in order to welcome lesbians.
In Massachusetts, the Patriots’ Trail Girl Scout Council – one of the 10 largest GSUSA councils in the country, comprising 65 cities and towns in and around Boston – unashamedly seeks to normalize homosexuality. In a conference organized in the spring of 2000 by Patriots’ Trail, workshops for Girl Scout leaders included three on the subject of making GSUSA more supportive of lesbian and bisexual girls within local councils.
According to one GSUSA newsletter touting the successful conference, when asked to suggest ideas to make Girl Scouting more welcoming for lesbian and bisexual girls, council leaders suggested “recruitment of new role models who can support GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered) youth as allies” and the “elimination of programs that, by title or design, exclude or are insensitive to new family structures.”
In the Midwest, in a section of its website entitled “Celebrating Differences,” the Girl Scout Council of Greater Minneapolis posted “Growing up in a gay family,” an excerpt from a pro-homosexual website. The article was simultaneously a sympathetic look at being “gay” while taking shots at what the writer, Abigail Garner, considered “a homophobic society.”
The Minneapolis Girl Scout website also provided a link to Garner’s website. There, young Girl Scouts could find other articles written by Garner, including recommendations for “coming out” to their own families, books about homosexuality, and links to other homosexual organizations.
More alarmingly, the Teen Outreach Volunteer Program (TOVP), which exists within the GSUSA’s Minnesota councils, gives older Girl Scouts an opportunity to help younger ones on a host of difficult issues. Not surprisingly, homosexuality is one of those topics.
TOVP coordinator and Girl Scout troop leader Tricia Andrews said senior scouts undergo a week-long training schedule on a variety of subjects, including gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered issues. “Then the high school girls give presentations [on these issues] to younger girls,” she said.
Some local GSUSA councils are even more adamant about their promotion of the homosexual agenda. When supporters were listed this year for the euphemistically-entitled “Dignity for All Students Act,” a pro-gay California school bill sponsored by lesbian state legislator Sheila Kuehl, there was the name of the Girl Scouts of Santa Clara council. In New York, Girl Scouts of Rockland County was a proud sponsor of the Gay Pride Rockland event this past summer.
Lesbians welcome?
Of course, simply saying the Girl Scouts welcome lesbians doesn’t mean there are lesbians in the Girl Scouts.
Unfortunately, the truth appears to be that GSUSA does, in fact, attract lesbians – lots of them.
In her 1997 book, On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience, lesbian writer Dr. Nancy Manahan collected the experiences of 33 lesbians in the Girl Scouts, including herself.
One autobiographical account, by lesbian writer Marcia Munson, said her first exposure to lesbianism happened when she was 13, on her second trip to a summer Girl Scout camp. “I walked in on two naked counselors early one morning in the staff house double bed,” she said, adding happily, “I found out, a few years later, that at least half the staff, including the director, were lesbians that summer.”
Other lesbians told similar stories in On My Honor. Lesbian Janet de Vries, who has been involved with GSUSA for 25 years, said that she discovered other lesbians in leadership as a 19-year-old camp staffer in Wyoming. She said, “I became involved with another staff member and discovered more about sex in one summer than I had learned in a year of kissing.” When de Vries and her lesbian “life partner” accompanied a group of girl scouts on a trip to California, the pair’s sexual orientation became a subject of discussion for the younger girls.
Dr. Margaret Cruikshank noted in her vignette, entitled “One Entry Point to Lesbian Nation,” that when she was a junior counselor at a camp in Minnesota, “I didn’t know that most of the counselors were lesbians.” Cruikshank said “scouts was the perfect cover” for lesbians who were in camp leadership positions.
Such lesbian counselors often remain in GSUSA, according to lesbian writer Jorjet Harper. She interviewed Girl Scout leaders across the country for a journalistic piece published in a New York City homosexual magazine, and her article was included in On My Honor.
Karen Gotzler, who spent four years as an administrator in a Midwest GSUSA council, told Harper that most of the women who serve in lower positions as Girl Scout troop leaders or local volunteers are straight. But “if you’re talking about the professional staff, the percentage of lesbians is much higher,” she said, estimating the number as “at least 30%.” In fact, Gotzler said, “there are some councils where nearly all the professional staff are lesbians.”
Harper cited a number of Girl Scout staffers who agreed with Gotzler’s estimates of 30%, including one woman who had worked on the 500-member staff of the GSUSA national headquarters office in New York.
Conclusion
No one is suggesting that GSUSA will soon be trading in their trademark green uniforms for lavender blouses and skirts. For the most part, participation in the Scouting program is a tremendous benefit to girls, and Girl Scouts are almost universally seen as an asset to their communities across the nation.
However, for Christian parents, the prospect of their daughters being influenced to accept lesbianism as a normal and natural variation of human sexuality may soon become a reality, as much a part of the fabric of Girl Scouting as learning to treat a sprained ankle on a camping trip.
As shocking an allegation as that might seem, parents ought at least to take a closer look. While one is sure to find quality inside a box of Girl Scout cookies, a Christian parent may be surprised to find out what’s inside the local GSUSA council. 
