Developmental needs are relatively minimal, and can be easily dealt with outside the program.
Uh, what? Boy Scouts is all about boy's development. The needs of boys to learn how to be boys and men in successful and healthy ways are not "minimal." If they don't get it at Boy Scouts, they will try to find it somewhere else. Because it is a basic social need.
Interaction with girls will happen outside the program, won't it?
Thanks for proving my first point: the development a Boy Scout undergoes and the skills learned are not unique to males in the slightest. That we should be inculcating boys and girls into mutually exclusive gender roles is fundamentally wrong. Creating an all male echo chamber that is far less likely to check on misogyny or homophobia (both large problems in the SQ) than an integrated program is not how we make boys be better men.
My confusion as to how an all-male organisation is any more likely to be homophobic than a mixed-gender one aside, I can only respond by again pointing out the existence of the Girl Scouts, which has a substantial programmatic overlap with the Boy Scouts. The point about funding is superfluous; the idea of treating the two groups as if they were segregated education systems that need to be consolidated to ensure some kind of equality borders on the absurd. The two are separate organisations, talk of "proportionality" is a nonsequitur, as if one's prosperity (a word I don't think many would throw around in reference to the BSA in the first place) was coming at the expense of the other.
Let me say it again:
Scouting does not exclude women. If you were to insist on a mixed-gender group, there even is Venturing. If that does not satisfy you still, there are a whole bevy of breakaway and Scouting-like groups for you to choose from. Perhaps the Unitarian Universalist scouts, whatever they are called, might suit you.
As for the religious requirement, the development of spirituality is part of Scouting's mission, as laid out by Baden-Powell. It is part of its purpose. To take that out would be to change the nature of Scouting.
The purpose of the Boy Scouts is not to act as some "social justice" pressure group. Again, if that is what one is looking for, there are options. There seems to be a tendency amongst "social justice" types to assume that when a potential platform exists, there is an
obligation of sorts to use that platform to advance "social justice" (as they define it), regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with why that platform is there in the first place.
This is what I'm mildly getting from some of the comments here: since the Boy Scouts
could allow girls to join, or it
could openly allow non-religious people as members, or it
could fight "misogyny or homophobia", it
should or even
must do those things. It reminds me of when someone asked what the College Republicans were doing to "fight rape culture" at one of our meetings. While we gave them some kind answer, after the meeting we were all quick to observe that we weren't really doing anything because
that was not the point of the group. The Boy Scouts obviously should not spread misogyny or homophobia, but it doesn't exist to combat them in particular, either, beyond aiming instilling a moral compass in its members.
