The War on Girl Scouts is getting personal.

Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts have their critics on the left. Objections to the Boy Scouts mostly focus on the group's 1991 ban on gay members or leaders (which is unique to the Boy Scouts USA - their Canadian and European counterparts have no such policy). Since 2000, when the group's legal right to reject gay troop leaders was upheld by the Supreme Court's Boy Scouts of America v. Dale decision, protests have mostly been held on a local scale by families, schools, and communities. When the BSA faced a series of embarrassing revelations in 2010 about child sexual abuse by scoutmasters, many drew parallels with the Catholic Church, another male-led, gay-unfriendly hierarchy that sheltered pedophiles. The BSA is churchlike in another way: the group expressly prohibits membership (even as Cub Scouts) of atheists and agnostics. Local Boy Scout troops and councils that have tried (or been forced) to follow anti-discrimination policies have been banned or ejected from the national organization.

How did this sharp division between Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts come to be? Most adults remembering their own scouting days are only vaguely aware that there's any difference at all between the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts. What does it say about gender and child-rearing in this country that while the Girl Scouts foster a strong ethos of feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism, the Boy Scouts now embody a code of values Rick Santorum could endorse? Is the gender gap in electoral politics being replicated around our kids' campfires?

To put it another way, are Boy Scouts from red states and Girl Scouts from blue?

In truth, while the two organizations were founded with similar purposes, history has enormously widened the ideological gulf between them. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts share a founding father: Robert Baden-Powell, credited with inventing the worldwide scouting movement. Baden-Powell was a soldier of the British Empire, active in battles in Africa and India. While conquering indigenous people in what is now South Africa, Baden-Powell met American soldier of fortune Frederick Russell Burnham, who introduced him to the Indian lore and Wild West mythos that came to inform, with a dose of British Kipling-ish élan, the style and substance of the scout experience. Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, published in 1908, lay the groundwork for the Boy Scouts of America organization, which was founded in 1910 by Chicago's W. D. Boyce.

Aided considerably by Norman Rockwell, who inked covers for its Boys' Life magazine beginning in 1913 and illustrated its annual calendar for over 50 years, the Boy Scouts quickly came to represent a kind of all-American ideal of health, outdoor exploration, and patriotic goodness. It also served as a pipeline to leadership in a country still ruled mostly by men. Anyone could be a Cub Scout, but those who have ascended to the pinnacle of scouting, Eagle Scout, are overrepresented within military academies, NASA, and even Congress. Texas governor and former presidential candidate Rick Perry, an Eagle Scout, wrote his first book on the glories of scouting and the need to defend the BSA against secularists who would try to defeat it. Structurally, the BSA tends to wrap itself around existing power structures - so that, for instance, scout troops are chartered by community organizations, most frequently churches. Today, the largest single partner of the BSA is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.