Flashback 1999: A club that's for all kids

     Facebook served up this column from 1999, which I posted a dozen years ago when the Boy Scouts were enduring one of their regular spates of controversy. Since then, the popularity of the Scouts has continued to crater — from 4 million members, back when I was part of the organization in the 1970s, to about 1 million now. Shaken by social changes, criticism over its tardy decision to stop excluding gay scouts followed by the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't exodus of Mormons plus, I imagine, the isolating effects of social media and an increased tendency of people not to join groups in the living world.  The Camp Fire organization, on the other hand, while significantly smaller, is going strong.

     Just as the Boy Scouts of America were twirling in bad publicity hell after the latest flap over its booting out gay scouts , I received a letter from the Camp Fire Boys and Girls, touting their corn maze down in Ottawa, Ill.
     The maze is immense; more than 10 acres of cornfield. Nothing quite so evocative of sweet late summer as a corn maze. But that wasn't what I was really interested in.
     What I was really interested in was sex. Or more specifically, how Camp Fire manages to sidestep the issue that has so thoroughly bollixed its big brother, the Boy Scouts?
     How do they manage to cook S'mores and pitch tents without getting hung up on the emerging sexualities of their little charges?
     The answer is surprising.
     "Kids are kids and our job is to give them an opportunity to have a really wonderful time growing up," said Jean Lachowicz, executive director of the Metro Chicago Council of the Camp Fire Boys and Girls. "We are very family-oriented. The other issues just don't come into play."
     Surely, I said, she can't be suggesting that Camp Fire Boys and Girls, whose members range from kindergarten to high school, allow gay youngsters to make lanyards and potholders alongside everybody else, as if they were normal people?
     "We don't even get into that," she said. "Who are we to say?"
     What a freakish anomaly. A group that doesn't try to dictate to the personal lives of its members. Practically revolutionary in sex-obsessed, eye-to-the-keyhole, who-do-we-hate-this-week America.
     Just as the Boy Scouts have a credo, filled with a bunch of Victorian hooey about duty and moral rightness, so Camp Fire has its own motto, which it calls an "Inclusiveness Statement." They post it on the wall.
     It reads: "Camp Fire Boys and Girls works to realize the dignity and worth of each individual and to eliminate human barriers based on all assumptions which prejudge individuals."
     Talk about radical. Morality in America is almost always used as an excuse to ostracize people. Very rarely is it offered up as a reason to include them (though, frankly, even if I believed the view of the Boy Scouts — that there is something so radically wrong with homosexuals they can't be taught how to use semaphore flags — I think that would motivate me to want to get them in Scouting all the more, in the hopes that our vigorous outdoor program and credo of moral certitude would win them over and draw them away from perversion. To shun them seems, well, to lack faith in heterosexuality).
     Before parting, I had one more question about Camp Fire. Where did the boys come from? When my sister, Debbie, was a Blue Bird, 30 years ago, it was an all-girl thing. Court order? Lawsuit?
     "In 1975 we switched to boys and girls," said Lachowicz. "We found the clubs were taking in more and more boys , so they decided to change the organization so it is co-ed."
     A huge, cathartic crisis?
     "Nah," she said. "Camp Fire has always been a very, very flexible organization."
And one that doesn't feel it needs to add to the problems of any youngster straying from society's norms.
      "Kids want to be involved in something that's positive and not painful," she said. "We just do what we have to do. Kids who join Camp Fire are really happy. We have a blast."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 17, 1999