In what could go down as the next great instance of parental immaturity since calls for a cookie embargo, mothers in Covington, Louisiana have dismantled their daughters' Girl Scout troop to protest a Colorado troop's decision to accept a 7-year-old transgender girl named Taylor into their ranks. Actually, the Girl Scouts East Louisiana officially (because they posted on their website) repudiated the Colorado Girl Scouts by barring transgender children from joining their mafia of door-to-door cookie peddlers, but troop leader Susan Cramond was so unnerved at the Louisiana chapter's delayed response that she pushed to disband her troop.


Cramond says that when she first contacted the acolytes of the Louisiana Scouts high council, she didn't get the swift "non" in response to her pearl-clutching query about whether Louisiana too would go the way of barbarous Colorado and teach children valuable life lessons such as respecting the differences in others because that's what being a human is all about. Another troop mother, Susan Bryant-Snure (Louisiana, after all, being the land of unpronounceable surnames), said that the Louisiana Scouts made "the right decision; they just made it in a way that made us nervous."

The mothers wanted to be part of an organization that only admits children who have been "persistently and consistently" identified as girls, one that reinforced their professed Christianity and their shared opinion to "let family decide" on the issue of gender, instead of, say, psychology, because families are always super accepting and judgment-free units. Enter the American Heritage Girls, a group whose origin story is deeply rooted in all those anachronistic, quasi religious virtues that made America a more wholesome and bigoted place in the 50's. As the organization's website explains,

American Heritage Girls was founded in 1995 in West Chester, Ohio by a group of parents wanting a wholesome program for their daughters. These parents were disillusioned with the increasing secular focus of existing organizations for girls. They wanted a Judeo-Christian focused organization for their daughters and believed that other parents were looking for the same for their daughters. This became the catalyst for the birth of the organization we have come to know as the American Heritage Girls.


Girls lucky enough to have value-centric, nuclear families can earn merit badges in such categories as "Family Living Frontier" and "Heritage Frontier" because the American Heritage Girls exist as the last outpost of good, Christian living on the frontier between Louisiana and Colorado. Here follow some of the badges themselves, reminders that we'll probably never get our shit together enough to send a mission to Mars:

All God's Children

Bible Basics

Daughter of the King

Puppetry

Stick Shifts & Safety Belts (somebody listens to Cake)

7 C's of History

Archery

In any other context, "archery" would seem normal, but here it just seems unsettling, especially when you think of the American Heritage Girls not as innocent children but armed members of the next Children's Crusade.

Transgendered Girl Scout in Colorado causes stir [Times-Picayune]

American Heritage Girls