What's so scary about the Girl Scouts?

You know, I don't like the stereotype that a little of liberals have that conservatives are anti-woman. Like any stereotype, it's unfair and oversimplified. But people like Republican Congressman Bob Morris of Indiana don't make it easy on me.

The same week that my long-anticipated Thin Mints and Shortbread cookies finally arrived (yay!), Rep. Morris wrote a letter to his Congressional colleagues encouraging them to oppose a resolution honoring the Girl Scouts on their 100th anniversary. They call these "nonbinding" resolutions because they have pretty much zero effect on anything other than making whoever's being honored feel "Aw, Congress gave me a shout-out!" They usually pass unanimously, and are often good ways for Congresscritters to do non-political favors for one another, i.e., "Well, if I vote for your oil pipeline incentive bill my progressive constituents will fry me alive, but I can totally get behind your resolution to recognize the contribution of Western Pennsylvania llama farmers to ska music." So, in other words, opposing one of these is kind of tacky. Very bad Congressional etiquette.

Morris doesn't want to high-five the Girl Scouts because, per his letter (based on his highly thorough Internet research), they are the tactical arm of Planned Parenthood - whatever that means - and that the organization sexualizes young girls.

The Girl Scouts have no relationship of any kind with Planned Parenthood. Period. And yet lots of people besides Morris seem to think otherwise. Why? Why is it so easy to believe that a social/service group for young women is in league with a medical provider? And why would someone make that connection in the first place?

I think the answer lies in Morris's "sexualization" comment (also not true), and in another statement from the letter, that the Girl Scouts have "been subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values."

I was a Girl Scout starting in fifth grade, up through maybe eighth grade. My mother led our troop, which also included my older sister Maria; a few years later Mom would help lead my youngest sister Elizabeth's Brownie troop. Mom was from Georgia, and her ultimate goal was fort he troop to raise enough money to take a trip to founder Juliette Gordon Low's birthplace in Savannah, like her own Girl Scout troop had done.

I don't know how other Girl Scouts did things, but our troop was in everything together. We earned patches together, did service projects together and went camping together. Looking back, I can better appreciate how many different types of girls were in our troop. We didn't all have mothers who had the free time to volunteer with the troop's activities, and most of our families didn't have a lot of money. If we couldn't figure out a way for everyone to take part in something, than we didn't do it.

Wait, that probably sounds socialist to Rep. Morris. What it actually taught me was to understand that not everybody had the same privileges that I did. It taught me not to say, "Well, I can afford to do this, so forget you."

Here's what else I learned:
- how to change a tire, something I recently discovered most of the people in my office can't do (and which came in handy not long after we earned our automotive car patch when we got a flat tire on a group trip to Carowinds)
- that women are perfectly capable of hacking rattlesnakes to death with a rake
- how to entertain ourselves in a cabin with no TV
- confidence, or whatever it takes for an 11-year-old girl to ask perfect strangers to buy your - it has to be said - overpriced cookies.

I also learned more intangible things, like how important it is to pitch in so that no one person gets stuck striking the tent, carrying the heavy stuff, etc., or how to take responsibility for your actions. Unlike our local Boy Scout troop, we didn't get funding from a lot of groups in our town; that was a sad, but ultimately a valuable lesson to learn as well.

Speaking of the Boy Scouts, my understanding from my male friends, and from seeing my nephew get involved once he was old enough, is that scouting was just as empowering an experience for them as Girl Scouts was for me. But I never hear anyone say that the Boy Scouts are "sexualizing" young men.

If anything, the Girl Scouts do the exact opposite. We live in a culture that still teaches young women that our only value is as sex objects or baby-makers. The Girl Scouts was the first place that a lot of us learned that we could be so much more. (Maybe that's what Morris objects to?)

He's backed down from his earlier position, but not by much. Thankfully, everyone else in Congress had the sense to ignore him and vote for the resolution anyway. Cookies for them, but not for this very nasty man from Indiana.