Why the right is so afraid of the Girl Scouts

The American culture war has always had a bit of a sweet tooth.

There were the Oreos that became boycott fodder after the brand released an ad centered on a young man coming out to his family. There were the M&M’s, whose female candy characters became recurring objects of Tucker Carlson’s concern after Mars swapped the Green M&M’s go-go boots for sneakers and otherwise made its anthropomorphic chocolates, in his estimation, insufficiently sexy.

And now there are Girl Scout cookies.

Over the weekend, a fresh conservative outrage cycle formed around reports that Girl Scouts could earn religious recognitions through programs that involve learning about Islam and, in some cases, visiting mosques. Right-wing figures quickly began calling for a boycott. Laura Loomer, herself a woman who has made a career out of loudly asserting her own opinions in public, declared that she would “never buy Girl Scout cookies ever again.”

There was, however, an important bit of context missing from much of the outrage.

“There’s misinformation circulating online today about Girl Scouts and religion,” the organization said in a statement responding to the controversy. “Girl Scouts is not a religious organization and does not teach religion. For more than a century, we’ve welcomed girls of every faith and background.”

Girl Scouts does offer its own national “My Promise, My Faith” pin, which asks girls to explore the relationship between the Girl Scout Law and their own beliefs. But the other religious recognitions worn by Girl Scouts are developed and administered by outside faith organizations. Islamic programs exist alongside recognitions created for Jewish, Hindu and numerous Christian Girl Scouts, among others. Participation is optional.

In other words, this was not a new Girl Scout initiative, much less the ideological pivot some of the outrage suggested.

Still, the speed with which the latest controversy took hold should feel familiar to anyone who has watched the organization become a recurring political specter for the American right.

More than two decades ago, anti-abortion activists in Texas urged consumers to boycott Girl Scout cookies after a local council lent its name to sex-education events organized by Planned Parenthood. The relationship was subsequently inflated into a much broader — and repeatedly debunked — claim that buying Girl Scout cookies somehow funded Planned Parenthood. The organization has also drawn conservative ire for welcoming LGBTQ scouts and leaders and, since the 1990s, allowing members to substitute another word for “God” in the Girl Scout Promise according to their own spiritual beliefs. Some families who objected to those policies helped fuel explicitly Christian scouting alternatives.

At a certain point, the pattern becomes more interesting than any individual controversy.

Because the Girl Scouts are not Oreos. They are not M&M’s. They are not even, at their core, a cookie-selling outfit.

They are an organization built around sending girls outward into the world.

Girl Scouts are supposed to learn things. They are supposed to earn badges, develop skills, sell things, handle money, go camping, meet new people, encounter unfamiliar places, ask questions, solve problems and make decisions. The official language is courage, confidence and character. Another word for what all of that requires is curiosity.

And curiosity has consequences.

Growing up in a particularly conservative pocket of the South, I occasionally heard a cruder formulation of the same principle: “Nosy girls become nosy ‘b-words.’”

It was usually meant as a warning.

I’m increasingly inclined to hear it as a promise.

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That promise is on unusually vivid display in “Cookie Queens,” Alysa Nahmias’ new documentary about four Girl Scouts attempting to become top cookie sellers during the organization’s brief annual sales season. The film’s own logline gets at the tension: four tenacious girls navigate an $800 million business “in which innocence and ambition collide.”

And these girls are ambitious.

There’s Olive, 12, from Charlotte, North Carolina, whose goal is to sell 8,000 boxes and who already possesses the polished ease of someone who understands how to speak to an audience. Five-year-old Ara is a tiny numbers-cruncher. Eight-year-old Shannon Elizabeth sets an exquisitely precise goal of 2,750 boxes, while 9-year-old Nikki enters the season with both a competitive streak and a family legacy to uphold: one of her older sisters was herself a Cookie Queen.

It would be easy to look at all of this — the card tables, homemade jingles, wagons stacked with brightly colored boxes — and see only an exceptionally cute American ritual. It is cute. That is part of the appeal.

But beneath all that cuteness, the girls are practicing something more consequential. They set goals and figure out how to meet them. They learn to make a pitch, hear no, adjust and try again. They watch what sells and what doesn’t. They handle money, study their customers and discover, sometimes surprisingly early, that they are capable of moving through the world without waiting for someone else to tell them exactly how.

The cookies are almost beside the point.

In some ways, they always have been.

When Juliette Gordon Low founded the first Girl Scout troop in Savannah, Georgia, in 1912, its 18 members came together, as the organization now describes it, with “a sense of curiosity and a belief that they could do anything.” That was not an entirely neutral proposition at a moment when American women still lacked a constitutional right to vote and girls were being prepared for far narrower versions of adulthood.

More than a century later, the vocabulary has modernized, but the underlying idea has barely budged. Girl Scouts’ own research identifies curiosity as one of the qualities that make up an “entrepreneurial mindset”; its programming encourages girls to ask questions, take risks, learn from failure and find new ways of doing things. And each February, World Thinking Day asks millions of Girl Scouts and Girl Guides around the world to learn about other cultures, broaden their perspectives and approach the world with what the organization calls “curiosity, courage and compassion.”

Put plainly, this is not an organization particularly interested in producing girls who are incurious about the world beyond their own front doors.

And perhaps that is why curiosity becomes such a loaded quality when the curious person is a girl.

Curiosity has a way of making obedience conditional. A girl who is encouraged to ask questions about the world may eventually ask questions about the rules governing her own life: Who made them? Why do they exist? Who benefits from them? What happens if I disagree?

For those conservatives more invested in a more hierarchical vision of gender, that kind of independent judgment presents an obvious problem. Submission works best when it feels inevitable, when the boundaries of a woman’s life are presented not as choices someone made for her, but simply as the natural order of things. (The phrase brings to mind the chilling title of the 2022 documentary series “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey.”) Curiosity introduces alternatives.

Which makes the latest Girl Scout controversy unusually revealing. The organization is not, by its own account, teaching girls Islam. What it is willing to do is allow a Muslim Girl Scout to explore her own faith — and, more broadly, encourage girls to encounter beliefs, cultures and people beyond the boundaries of their immediate experience.

The radical proposition is not that Girl Scouts tells girls what to think.

It’s that, for more than a century, it has been telling them they are capable of finding out for themselves.