Long before the Boy Scouts decided that our young men couldn’t possibly go camping in the woods without girls in tow, its female counterpart had gone woke.
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Sure, you can still get those addictive cookies from little girls in cheap vests decorated with embroidered patches manning folding tables outside the grocery store. But if you enroll your own daughter among their ranks, she might come home repeating some blue-haired sermon about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Worse, she might even have to share bathrooms, dressing rooms, and lodging with her confused peers of the opposite sex.
That’s not news to the average reader. Girl Scouts has been a lost cause for a while now, and, unsurprisingly, it’s had to suffer the consequences of its wokeness. Slumps in membership have forced the national organization to more than double its membership dues by 2027. At this point, there are just over 100 councils nationwide, the result of several waves of reorganization. And yet, the organization remains relevant enough that Muslims in the United States are turning Girl Scouts into a vehicle for evangelization.
Earlier this week, White House correspondent Natalie Winters reported that Girl Scouts can now get little badges for learning about Islam, touring mosques, memorizing sayings and prayers written in the Quran, and experimenting with fasting during Ramadan. Muslim Girl Scouts can get badges for sharing “Ramadan With a Friend” by inviting non-Muslims to participate in the feasting after dark (iftar), or by taking them to a mosque and having them join in salah, the obligatory prayer Muslims participate in five times a day.
Meanwhile, a Girl Scout troop in Sacramento hosted an event at a local Christian school in collaboration with SALAM Islamic Center — a group that advertises its “Strong Islamic Values.” That event reportedly featured a tour of a mosque, a hijab photo booth, lessons about modesty, and an “information booth about Palestine” to foster “awareness and empathy among the girls.”
To be sure, the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) isn’t actively engaged in handing out these badges, and they aren’t being used across every council or troop. That said, the GSUSA did approve the badges, and “Mosque-based programs operate in Sacramento, Naperville, Long Island, Virginia, Maryland, Brookland, San Diego, and more” with the goal of integrating “prayer, hijab rules, Ramadan, Islamic education and mosque outreach into Girl Scouting.”
When the group faced backlash, it protested that the whole thing wasn’t really anything new and that it wasn’t an organization-wide program. The GSUSA is not technically affiliated with any religious group, but it has historically allowed religious programs administered by outside faith communities to integrate themselves within its programming.
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In an emailed statement to Newsweek, Robert McCaw, the director of the Government Affairs Department for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, made the whole thing about anti-Muslim propaganda. “Girl Scouts and Scouting America have for decades recognized comparable religious awards and emblems for a wide range of faith communities, making the decision to single out Muslim scouts and Muslim religious recognitions especially revealing,” he said.
But the problem isn’t necessarily that the anti-Muslim bigots don’t want their daughters learning about “the religion of peace” lest they don a hijab and start learning Arabic; rather it’s that teaching girls about the Islamic faith while they participate in Girl Scouts strikes one as incredibly paradoxical and ludicrous.
Keep in mind that the Girl Scouts was founded by Juliette Gordon Low in 1912. Low was a native of Savannah, Georgia, and by that time was a rich, childless widow with a passion for the burgeoning feminist movement — especially in its championing of education for girls. Her mother had founded both the Georgia chapter of Colonial Dames and the Georgia chapter of the American Red Cross. Both women were active members in women’s groups dedicated to causes like “suffrage, labor reform, public health, and education.”
According to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, when Low went and founded her first Girl Scouts troop, the stated goal was to give girls opportunities to spend time outdoors and to teach them to be self-sufficient leaders. She used tea parties to persuade upper-class Savannah women that she was encouraging their daughters to engage in exercises of elite female domesticity, rather than raising the next generation of feminists.
It’s true that feminism has done plenty to ruin society (after all, it was the gateway drug that eventually led to widespread cultural acceptance of LGBTQ+ lifestyles), but it’s also true that feminism and Islam ought to have very little in common. After all, the teachings of the Quran are the reason women in purist communities can’t leave the house without wearing a black sack that covers them from head to toe. In places where radical Islam is being practiced, Muslim girls don’t even get the luxury of an education.
And yet, as it happens, Islamist organizations have proven themselves to be very effective at taking over our Western cultural institutions — whether that’s our children’s scouting activities or our democracy. It should be especially concerning that a religious group, some of whose members have a track record of abusing and raping young girls, is actively trying to infiltrate America’s most widely recognized girls’ organization. It should be even more concerning that the GSUSA has effectively washed its hands of the whole matter.
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