The Boy Scout Jamboree just got a whole lot livelier. Now that girls are gonna be there the little male scouts will be able to earn a bunch of new merit badges like Spin-The-Bottle Champ and Getting To Second Base and Watching Girls In The Showers and General Social Embarrassment. Isn’t that great? The weekend campout has now turned into date night because society says there can no longer be anything just for boys or just for girls.

It all sounds like a Kinks song to me: “Girls scouts will be boy scouts and boy scouts will be girl scouts … It’s a mixed up world except for Lola.” The genesis for this scout blending seems to have come from a young girl who wanted to be an Eagle Scout but couldn’t because the Girl Scouts don’t offer that type of program. Fair enough. Girls should be able to do anything the boys get to do and vice versa (but that doesn’t mean they need to do it together). I mean, shit, what little girl would want to be out selling cookies when she could be in the forest blasting bunnies with steel-tipped arrows? I get it. It’s not about the right to do some activity, it’s about the homogenization of the organizations that provide the activities.

So you have two stores: one sells just milk, the other sells just cookies. Over time, visitors to the cookie store start to agitate, they tell the owner that he should start selling milk, but the cookie store owner, instead of listening to his customers and tweaking his business model to please them, decides to try to get a law passed that would require the milk store owner to sell cookies. What kinda shit is that? What you had was a Girl Scout problem – they weren’t providing programs that challenged and satisfied all segments of their community – but instead of fixing it they made it someone else’s problem, and now the Boy Scouts are the Co-ed Scouts.

Now, I can see the value in scouting and I dig it because it’s patriotic and it gets the little bastards out of the house, but boy-girl scouting kinda confuses me. Are we trying to celebrate our differences or are we trying to obliterate those differences entirely? Are we supposed to respect women and treat them with a measure of decorum or is life just one big common tent where we’re all the same and anything goes? This isn’t just about boys and girls and the end of the innocence for scouting, it’s about the politically correct movement that says that there can never ever in America be an organization or a meeting or a store where people of just a certain type or with just a certain interest can gather in peace. The left-hander’s club has to invite the right-handers, the quilting group needs to welcome the cross-country truckers, your fuckin’ aunt needs to be invited to the bachelor party. True liberty means going where you please and being with who you want.

The little ten-year-old boy just wanted to go on a campout … To run barefoot, skim rocks, to go three days without bathing, to get away from the girls in the neighborhood that he doesn’t understand, to be a little boy, to channel his inner Huck Finn. Now he has to take his little sister with him, and, it’s just not the same.