Read this and weep (and be outraged)

The unmatchable Heather Mac Donald says goodbye to the Boy Scouts - and wonders how far the American war on men and masculinity will go.

You subscribe to Unreported Truths to read me. So I try not to take your time with recommending other writers - and certainly not single articles.

But I read a fair bit, across the ideological and cultural spectrum (yes, even The New York Times op-ed page, I read it so you don’t have to) - and sometimes something pops so forcefully I have to send it on. Helps if it’s not paywalled, of course.

Heather Mac Donald has been writing about the war on men for a while. Today, in City Journal, she turned her attention to the Boy Scouts. Who are no longer the Boy Scouts at all, but Scouting America.

Along the way she points out just how ugly life has gotten for American men, including at the most basic level of life and death:

Men die of cancer at a rate of 189.5 per 100,000, compared with 135.7 cancer deaths per 100,000 women, yet only research to beat breast cancer gets celebrity treatment. Men die of diabetes at a 60 percent higher rate than females...

For every 100 females who die of opioid overdose, 227 males die of the same cause. Men kill themselves at nearly four times the rate of females, and the male rate is rising, due to an increase in suicides among the 15–34 age cohort. Workplace mortality is ten times higher for males.

As Mac Donald notes, none of those gaps have stopped the federal government from throwing money at women’s health initiatives and research:

The Department of Health and Human Services has an Office on Women’s Health; the Centers for Disease Control has an Office of Women’s Health; the Health Resources and Services Administration has a Women’s Preventive Services Initiative… the government’s Healthy People 2030 initiative set 29 health targets for women and four for men.

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(No boys allowed!)

SOURCE

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But most of the piece is dedicated to the long slow un-boying of the Boy Scouts. Near the end, Mac Donald points out that:

The DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] apparatus is the antithesis of the original Scouting ethic. Scouts are supposed to focus outward, not on themselves, and especially not on au courant diversity characteristics. They are supposed to be dedicated to universal ideals, not to identitarian commitments…

But the Boy Scouts no longer care. Why would they? These days practically every major charity and philanthropy sings from the same woke/Democratic hymnbook. (This was never more clear to me than on Sep. 2, 2021, when the American Civil Liberties Union came out in favor of Covid jab mandates. I’m still struggling with that one.)

And so the Scouts are now less interested in helping boys become men than in ensuring every she/they/zir/ knows she/they/zir is (at least) equal to the average male. Because no one else is working on that particular problem, you see.

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(For under 20 cents a day you don’t just get to read what I write - you can read what I read too. Which is a bonus. I think.)

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I’d quote more from Mac Donald’s infuriating and necessary piece. But even thinking about it is sending my blood pressure to dangerous levels. (More proof I’m just another angry white man.)

Read for yourself here,