Why I Won't let My Sons Join Boy Scouts

My oldest son will be entering 2nd grade this coming school year, I have been recently thinking and have already talked to him about him joining Boy Scouts. He’s small in stature and loves adventure and learning new things, so naturally I thought this would be a great opportunity for him to do an extracurricular activity that he’d probably enjoy a great deal. I had a really great scout leader and “pack” all picked out, a nice guy from a nice family, and my son knows the other boys in the troop, so I was all but ready to pay the yearly dues and start his membership. That is until today when I heard the disappointing news that the Boy Scouts of America, after a confidential 2 year review, reaffirmed their Anti-Gay policy. This includes both boys as members and adults as scout leaders. I honestly didn’t even know this was a policy in the first place. One of the biggest and oldest traditional groups for a young boy to join and they are adamantly homophobic. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. My head wants to explode. It took 2 years of review to decide, yup, we still want to be a markedly bigoted group that teaches kids it’s okay to be exclusionary and hateful. No Thank You!

The insinuation is horrible. No, its sickening. They are essentially proclaiming that gays aren’t fit to lead and care for children. Or that boys should not associate with their gay friends. That it’s okay to exclude people based on their lifestyle or traits that they are born with. That someone else is less than. I don’t even want to say out loud that they must think homosexuality equates with pedophilia, because that makes me furious. Beyond furious. I shouldn’t have to even have to explain that that’s insane. Anyway you spin it, this policy is not okay.

The sad thing is, this probably doesn’t even effect each individual troop that much. I have no clue on what the stance of my son’s future, would-have-been scout leaders would be, and at this point, that doesn’t really matter. How in good conscience can I let my son become a member of an exclusionary group that stands up for bigotry and hatred. I just can’t. I teach my children whenever an opportunity arises, to stand up for their peers, and to accept all kinds of people, so obviously since the Boy Scouts is standing up against this message and standing for the complete opposite, I just can’t become a party to it.

How am I supposed to predict, at such a young age, my child’s or my children’s friends or future nieces or nephews sexual preferences? I can’t. So how can I encourage or allow membership into an exclusionary, bigoted group that one day could potentially not even allow them or their friends or family members admittance or participation. Both of my older children have friends with gay parents, as well as I have friends, how can I support and give money to an organization that excludes these friends and their families. What if my son goes to school and says how cool this new club is, and one of his best friends is upset because his kind isn’t welcome there? As I previously stated, No thank you!

I feel like this is a good teaching opportunity for me and my kids. Yes, my son was looking forward to the camping trips and earning badges, but sorry, we will not join exclusionary bigoted groups, even if it means we are disappointed in missing out in activities we wanted to do.

I usually stay away from blogging about and pushing my agenda as far as gay issues or marriage, which I fully support, because it’s not my job to push my views on others, but I feel like its important to make a stand and speak out against blatantly bigoted groups like the BSA. I know they are a private organization and can do what they want with their membership. I also feel like I no longer want them promoting their clubs, which most certainly stand for hate, in our children’s public schools. How can we even let them set up booths at open houses when all walks of life walk those halls? When the scout leaders call my home and in the fall and when I walk past the tables filled with fliers, I plan on saying exactly why I will not let my sons join Boy Scouts, and I hope my children take note in what I will say. It’s unfortunate that they choose to be so hateful, but without looking back I can say that I will not support in any way or look at the Boy Scouts in quite the same way again.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Editing Children's Literature

How many parents out there find yourselves editing out certain things in children’s literature or classic nursery rhymes or choose not to read them to your kids because they may be violent or scary?

Many of the stories, fables, nursery rhymes and fairy tales that I and my peers or our parents grew up on are often more violent and scary than most of the young children’s books put out there today.  The question is: is there anything wrong with that?  I grew up on The Brothers Grimm, Aesop’s Fables, Humpty Dumpty and Old King Cole.  Today these are often skipped over for fear of scaring kids or edited to make them more politically correct or less sexist or palatable for us to repeat to our kids.  The idea of editing classic works isn’t exactly a new idea; each generation there seems to be re-tweaks to our good old favorites.  My generation probably doesn’t know that the original Snow White ends with the Step-Mother dancing at her wedding wearing red hot iron shoes that kill her.  I definitely don’t remember that in my little Golden Books.   Imagine that kind of ending in, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, It probably wouldn’t fly. 

My generation had Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf with big terrible claws and teeth, and Hansel and Gretel and the witch that tries to eat them, all written as cautionary tales.  If you pick up a modern copy today, they probably won’t be the same; they’ve been rewritten and toned down a bit.  Instead of the wolf eating dear grandmother, she’s locked in a closet.  Another example, the recent remake of Rapunzel is a bit tamer than the original book that has her parents give her away and her love interest blinded by thorns.  Another example I bet most people don’t realize is, in the original Frog Prince story, the princess didn’t kiss the frog; she threw him against the wall as hard as she could to turn him into a prince.

I remember when my oldest son’s Preschool teacher read his class a book and made a big deal when she didn’t realize the book she was reading had a page with the boy holding a pop-gun.  She made sure to explain the difference to the kids about real guns and fake guns and how guns are bad, etc.  I’m not so sure the kids ever would have noticed otherwise?  Then last year in my son’s kindergarten class, they sang “Three Cool Mice,” instead of “Three Blind Mice.”  And now some modified versions of Puff the Magic Dragon now include Little Girls and Boys instead of just Boys.  And I know I sound odd as a feminist questioning whether we should be including little girls or not, but the thing is, it’s not the original piece of work.  When you change a masterpiece, wrong or right, it becomes something else and I don’t think that we can consider it or appreciate it in the same way.  Take it or leave it, but when something is changed,  we are no longer reading classic material, but something new entirely, based on our values as they are today.

 Flipping though our collection of Mother Goose Rhymes there are definitely some cringe-worthy tales in the group.  Many of the old rhymes were originally written as cautionary tales or as songs referencing incidents in history.  Many of them deal with death and dying and violence.  Some of the rhymes reference things that kids probably won’t recognize, but as parents, we are shocked.  There is Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, that is about Bloody Mary, and the Silver Bells and Cockle Shells that are referred to are torture devices, and the garden, her graveyard.  Then there is Goosie Goosie Gander, where I’ve read that it is a dig against the Catholic Church, and also the fact that it came from a time in England when “goose” meant “prostitute,” and of course there’s the line at the end, “There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers, so I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.”  It’s mean to be a cautionary tale of a certain action that gets a punishment, and a drastic one at that.  Speaking of vulgar, there’s See Saw Marjorie Daw, where the word “Daw” is an old English word for “Slut.”  Of course we have Ring Around the Rosie that is about the Bubonic Plague and Rock a Bye Baby who falls to the ground, yet we sing it to our babies as if it’s a sweet tune.  Three Blind Mice is another rhyme about Bloody Mary in which she violently cuts off their tails with a carving knife.  There’s not only violence in classic stories, but bad habits: we see both Old King Cole and even Santa Claus in A Night Before Christmas both smoking pipes; and then my kids wonder why the characters smoke when it’s something that I’ve told them is very bad and will cause one to become sick.  We’ve got Old Mother Hubbard, another dig at the Catholic Church, which the kids don’t understand, but the part where they reference the dog being dead may shock some now.  There’s The Woman in the Shoe who whips her kids and puts them to bed without any supper.  Not necessarily Mother of the Year material there.  There’s Jack who broke his crown, who is really King Louis XVI who was beheaded, and Jill, whom is really Marie Antoinette, that came tumbling after.  Another shocking one is Oh My Darling Clementine, who apparently wasn’t a swimmer and died.  Then there’s the age old tale that tells us exactly what Little Boys and Girls are Made of: puppy dog’s tails or sugar and spice.  Ugh, as if that’s something we really want to encourage gender roles in this day in age.  I even struggled with bible stories when talking to my kids.  I’d like to teach my children stories in the context of history, but I did disagree with my husband this past Easter when he was going to tell them about Jesus getting hung on the cross.  I thought it might be too much for them, since they mainly knew Jesus as the cute little baby lying in the manger and that his birthday is why we celebrate Christmas.  I’ve taught them about the good deeds of Jesus, and wasn’t ready to touch on the crucifixion part yet.

That all being said, the more I read about the original meanings of some of the nursery rhymes, even though they are violent and sexist, (Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater)  I do appreciate the social context that they were written in and the stories behind them.  Being a history major in college, I appreciate the historical references; I realize they are or were learning tools, although usually when kids are interested in nursery rhymes, they are too young to know the significance or learn about beheadings, and the plague, and history of the Catholic Church.  I do also see how they could have been helpful at the time they were written, for kids that didn’t understand or wanted to make light of what was going on.  Now a day I see children’s books written about September 11^th or divorce, things that may be more on our minds today.  People often say how in modern times we are so much more violent because of television and so forth, but I think we often discount how violent history really was.  Things like public hangings and the Wild West and the Holocaust and Slavery were really a thing and kids were well aware of the situations at the time.  Violence is not a modern day phenomenon by any means.  So it’s interesting how we perceive our society as being more violent, we criticize television for being so violent, yet we can hardly stomach traditional nursery rhymes in fear that we will expose our children to too much violence.  So maybe we are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to censoring children’s literature?

So cut to today and I question how we should be handling the classic literature.  On one hand I think it’s important not to lose the classics and make sure that my children know traditional stories as it’s a part of our culture, on the other hand, I am finding myself cringing while reading sometimes and often opt for modern classics like Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle.  Is it better to remember classics as they originally were, with their vulgar language and violent references or to sanitize and commercialize and make them less sexist and politically correct or abandon altogether?  At what point are they completely edited with each retelling that they become something entirely different than what they were originally written to be, by writers that we consider to have been literary masters.  There is something about the poetry and the flow and the artistry of an original work that is lost with each re-write.  It is no longer their words. 

 So I’m torn, but I am feeling myself gravitate towards the notion that we shouldn’t lose the classics.  The thing is, yes, children’s literature is sometimes violent, especially the classics, but should we be frightened to let our children hear these stories as if the stories will somehow make them act violent or shelter them from death and the feeling of fear as if we live in a world where these things don’t happen anyway.  As if fear and consequences aren’t things that children need to deal with on an everyday basis anyway.   Kids already feel fear; they already see or hear about violence.  Truth is, we live in a violent world.  People do die.  We do kill the worst of our criminals with capital punishment.  I’m not sure books are really the worst that they will see and hear.  No, I’m pretty sure, these books are nothing compared to the real world.  So these stories that show them fear and violence and wickedness can help them process these feelings at an early age where they are still learning what the world is all about.

I do personally shelter my kids from watching the news and violent television because on TV there are a lot of things that are just gratuitous.  There is way too much violence shown on regular TV, and it’s not meant to teach morals and lessons like many fairy tales are meant to do.

Another aspect to editing or sanitizing literature is the act of reading stories is meant to be entertaining.  No, books don’t only have to be violent to be entertaining or interesting- but there is some entertainment value to Hansel and Gretel and the Big Bad Wolf, and so on, that maybe we would possibly be stifling a future literary lover or creative mind because we edit the exciting parts out of stories.  It’s entertainment, but at the same time teaches values, so it’s different than the material that contains violence for entertainment only.  Should we tell our kids that if they want to write about exciting adventures, it’s best to edit out the uncomfortable information in the story?  There is imagery and connections that are lost in rewrites that is important to the original body of work.

We also fear that violence may transcend into real life, that kids will read Hansel and Gretel and not understand the difference between real and pretend.  I don’t think we are giving them enough credit and we could even be hindering their ability to develop the capacity to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction.   The need to learn that houses aren’t really made out of gingerbread and that witches won’t really eat you up is important.  Besides, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve never really heard of anyone citing a nursery rhyme for bad behavior.  Our kids may out of anger threaten to throw us in the oven, but anger is natural and an okay emotion to feel.  On the surface it’s all blood and death and an old woman fattening up little children to eat, but look beyond that and folk lores are stories that have been passed down generation after generation telling cautionary tales.  They are displaying which traits are the most desirable and showing us good morals and condemning bad behaviors that result in judgment where punishment is dealt out to the wicked.  Leaving a trail of bread crumbs to mark your path is a bad decision.  You will not find your way back through the woods.  Do not accept treats from strangers.  This is important.

I won’t say all Brothers Grimm or Aesop’s Fables or Shakespeare stories are for children, as some of them weren’t originally written for children as an audience.  This goes for modern day books as well, there is an audience for the Hunger Games and Harry Potter, and obviously it isn’t written for the very young.  It is also, of course, up to parents to read to their children what stories they feel that they can handle.  I do find it sad that future generations may not know classic stories because of the fear that they are inappropriate and also that we as parents feel too uncomfortable to discuss certain things with our children.  Something I feel like we don’t duplicate when we make rewrites is the poetic rhyming or the older style of writing.  This in itself is a part of history.  I do feel like as a culture is it important to not forget the old tales, as they are considered poetic masterpieces for a reason.