Expanding slightly.

For context, I'm cis straight, but an active ally. My son is in scouting. I am an Eagle Scout.

My association with scouting has waxed and waned over the years, but in general I had very positive experiences when I was young and have been happy with the organization since I got involved with my son in 2023.

Scouting in the mid to late 2010s explicitly clarified their rules to allow for openly queer youth and leaders, and opened the door for female youth members as well. Around the same time scouting also added a fully required merit badge called "Citizenship in Society". It expands on a series of citizenship focused merit badges (Citizenship in the community, nation etc).

Broadly speaking these merit badges are intended to promote being an active and engaged member of the community, performing community service, volunteer hours, learning about the structures of the government, and interviewing/meeting public servants.

A point of contention with the "Anti-woke" crowd was the "Citizenship in Society" merit badge, which is required when a scout is "Life" rank, the rank before Eagle. The merit badge in question is focused on learning about minorities struggles in our society, including feminism, LGBTQ activism, religious freedom, and social equality in general.

This formalized modern scouting's stance on these issues, requiring their youth to learn that a good scout should treat everyone equally regardless of their sexuality or gender, and fight for diversity, equity, and inclusion in every facet of society.

Hegseth in particular has had this program in his cross hairs since he was a Fox News anchor.

To continue to receive funding and support from the government, scouting has agreed to drop this merit badge, but fully refused to modify it's entry requirements to youth and adult leaders.

Extremely unfortunate, but understandable in the near term.

Scouting is an expensive program already even with this funding. About 40% of it's members get financial assistance from Scouting to pay for program and activity fees. Scouting would likely collapse without this support, though I'm already hearing grumblings of trying to get scouting fully fiscally independent (involving widespread cuts to certain programs and especially the management structure) so they don't have to worry about this moving forward.