Scouter99

Some people call me "uniform czar" but it's not something I usually individualize, as in your uniform is wrong. When I talk about the uniform, I do so generally to everyone. I never "criticize" anyone over their uniform, but on the rare occasion when I speak to an individual, I might say "you know, it's great you earned that World Conservation Award and want to display it proudly, but it would look better on your right pocket; it doesn't actually replace the WOSM seal." People appreciate a compliment and friendly guidance. There is another adult in our unit who I call Patch Police. The difference to me is very clear: He's obnoxious about patches and takes delight in deriding someone's uniform issue at inopportune moments mid-conversation, or bluntly, or chidingly. When he gets under someone's skin, they give him a dirty look; when I mention something, people thank me. When someone gives me a hard time about an issue on my uniform (I'm not perfect) I laugh with them; when someone gives him a hard time, he dresses them down. At the end of the day, there's a right way to wear everything, and its in the book. But if you want to wear something improperly on purpose, it's you looking silly, not me, so I'm not going to spend my time worrying about it. The only time I insist is formal functions, and even then it's not like someone can just fix a patch on the spot, so what's the point being obnoxious on the spot? I will say there's nothing like the uniform to make scouts silly. I once had a SPL running around at an Eagle court of honor telling all the boys to take off their merit badge sashes; I asked him just what he thought he was doing. "Today is about Johnny Scout, it's his big day and my dad [the SM] said it's rude for everyone else to be showing off their merit badges." I had a laugh and told him he couldn't be any more wrong.

Sectarianism is only negative. It pitches people against each other, its adherents assume superiority, and it places value on one set of beliefs over/at the cost of all others. Nonsectarian means that the BSA is unconcerned at all with which religion you practice so long as you practice one. People who think like your nondenominational example have the right idea, but their scope is limited to Christianity, and they just need to widen their perspective . People in your other example don't understand the difference between the word secular and nonsectarian. Nonsectarian doesn't mean you're avoiding any one or every religion, it means that you're not emphasizing one or the other at the expense of all the rest. You're always going to run into a wide array of answers on this, because its personal and its political; because some people are oblivious, and some people insist on being offended.

Our troop hadn't done it in a long time. Several years ago, the SM did something he called TLT, but it was some 3-hour PowerPoint he made. Last year an ASM did it, but gutted it and pared it town to a 1-hour lecture--both with predictable non-results. Your last option is flawed in that it implies that a troop must or is doing TLT if they send boys to NYLT, which is not the case. We require NYLT of any candidate for SPL.

Old controversy, but anyway. Boys and girls learn differently, have different natural proclivities and strengths/weaknesses, are motivated by different methods, etc. Some girls would fit right into Boy Scouts, and some boys would fit right into a knitting circle, and somewhere there is a white crow. Some local units do all kinds of things, and some local units shouldn't be Boy Scouts if they don't want to do things as proscribed. Boy Scouts exists because all over the Western world at the turn of the century men took an interest in the plight of young boys who weren't even their own, and decided to invest in them uniquely. They came from every background, from rough frontiersmen to clergy to wealthy progressives to cult of body idealists, not because they were setting out to "discriminate" or segregate, but because they saw a need for a particular sympathetic creature, the boy, and picked him for the philanthropy.