I’m An Eagle Scout — And For The First Time In Years, I’m Hopeful Thanks To Hegseth

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One day before the Trump administration ceased negotiations with the Iranian regime in Tehran, Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth offered an ultimatum to another entity, Scouting America, in hopes of avoiding a conflict. Hegseth announced that the Pentagon was prepared to use its leverage to force what was formerly the Boy Scouts of America to remove DEI from its programming, ensure biological sex as the basis for participation in its boy and girl tracks, and institute some pro-military reforms including a new merit badge and waving fees for service members’ children. Scouting America opted for peace. 

I’m an Eagle Scout and currently serve as an assistant scoutmaster and chaplain for a troop in Virginia, and I see every week where Scouts BSA has gone astray since I was a teenager. But I’m also the proud dad of a teenage girl working on her own Eagle. 

Amid all that contradiction, I couldn’t be happier about Hegseth’s strong-arm tactics.

In addition to my history with Scouts, I’m a Christian and a conservative. I get a lot of flak for being involved in Scouts BSA at all, to say nothing of having a daughter in the program. Let’s start there and then address the DEI insanity that Hegseth just helped wipe out.

“Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” This is what Scouting has always been about. I was raised on those virtues as a Scout. When I became a “girl dad” — father to what we used to call a “tomboy” — she wanted to be in Boy Scouts from the first moment she found my BSA uniform in the bedroom closet.

Of course, that wasn’t an option until 2017 when the Boy Scouts announced their intent to rebrand as Scouts BSA and allow for girl-only troops. Joining back up was a no-brainer for me, and enrolling my daughter was exciting. 

I preferred that she adopt the ethics of BSA rather than those of the Girl Scouts. It’s nothing against the Girl Scouts, but raising a tomboy in the 2010s demanded extra caution from any parent. The tidal wave of gender ideology that drowned America during the Biden years was just beginning to swell in 2018 when we were checking out Scout troops to join. We found one that had a large, well-established program just for girls — with boys in their own part of the building doing separate activities. 

Fully co-ed troops are rare. In all of my travels scouting, I have yet to see a troop that mixes boys and girls. Critics of girls in BSA tend to have an overblown conviction that they’re camping and tenting together; they are not. 

Part of this stems from a frustration over the war on boyhood happening across the world. I understand why critics of Scouting see girls’ presence as crowding out space for boys to mature in peace. 

But it has to be said that girls coming aboard didn’t put BSA on life support; the decades-long sexual abuse cover-up did. Trust between Scouting and its constituency is irrevocably broken. Girls didn’t make Boy Scouts membership drop from 6.5 million boys in 1972 to 1 million in 2024.

BSA lacks the power to make modern boys want to play outside and forsake their screen time for weekend campouts. Two generations of Fortnite-addled boys is the larger problem. 

The girls I see in BSA are some of the best scouts that I’ve ever seen in action. They’re serious, smart, interested in its virtues, and quick to pick up the skills. This is something we’re seeing everywhere from academia to the workplace — girls mature faster and are outperforming boys. 

We need to help young men, but we can’t make them want to be Scouts. BSA is downstream of boys’ interests, not the other way around. 

Many wonder how the Pentagon has leverage over Scouts, and it’s as simple as access to secure military sites and personnel for activities such as weekend lock-ins, merit-badge retreats, and jamborees. Hegseth gave Scouting America six months to comply with Executive Order 14173. That means protecting intimate spaces such as tenting, showers, and overnight accommodations. The wildcard has always been if a scout claimed to be trans. 

Before Hegseth’s move, it’s unclear how a troop would have been required to respond. Now, it’s unambiguous. All kids are welcome in Scouts BSA, but biology comes first if Scouts want to have a relationship with the U.S. military. 

Another Hegseth target was the Citizenship in Society merit badge, something that did not exist when I went through Boy Scouts in the early 2000s. Citizenship in Society is often called the “DEI merit badge” — because it is.

Citizenship in the World and the Nation already exist and together promote a patriotic duty to country and an understanding of globalist institutions (WHO, UNICEF, and the U.N.) and other models of government.

Rolled out in 2021 at the peak of cultural insanity following the death of George Floyd, Citizenship in Society was instituted as a mandatory merit badge for acquiring the rank of Eagle. The program was as flowery and ostensibly non-threatening as DEI itself. Diversity, equity, and inclusion all sound nice until you interrogate what they require of organizations. 

On more than one occasion, I sat through struggle sessions of teenagers, 90% white, ranking their privilege and their experiences being discriminated against based on elements of their identity — however real or contrived. Conversation between the teens broached sexual topics, class, gender, and racial identity, and included education on fringe religious practices, including Wicca. 

The merit badge was a victimhood-mentality machine. That’s what went on in those merit badge sessions, and adults were told not to participate in the conversations or help guide them — only listen. When it came time for my daughter to take the class with an outside merit badge instructor, I was actively discouraged from attending the sessions, as it could “make the kids uncomfortable.”  

It’s a sad summary of what has gone wrong with Scouts in the last decade, which is that adults are not expected to shape and mold the youth who go through the program. Your Scoutmasters are meant to be mentors, teachers, and guides, and they are supposed to impose upon you a way of seeing the world. Because Scouting has become afraid of its own shadow as a result of the abuse settlement, there has been a retreat from adult responsibility in shaping young people to be virtuous American citizens.

If I had a magic wand and could turn back the clock for Boy Scouts, it wouldn’t be to 2021 when DEI came around, or 2017 when girls joined up. I’d go back to the 1980s when abuse cases were starting to bubble up and plead with the people in charge to make it right. It’s the wound that affected everything that has happened with BSA.

Absent the power of time travel, Scouting can endure and serve all American youth by teaching them to be responsible, courageous, discerning, and honest. Scouts BSA changed my daughter’s life for the better, same as it did for me. Secretary Hegseth brought some much-needed reinforcements to all of us working within BSA every day to try and save it for future generations.

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Stephen Kent is an author and the creator of Geeky Stoics on YouTube. Follow him on X @stephenkentx.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.