0410 American Heritage Girls
As the old saying goes, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” Nowhere is this more true than in the culture war. Lamentably it has been those of the liberal persuasion who seemed to have best tapped into their creative skinning skills. One reason for their apparent successes stems from a basic relativistic view of ethics. Rights and wrongs are determined by individual beliefs and circumstances. Because absolute values are rare, personal “flexibility” is greatly enhanced. Obviously then, conservatives are at a disadvantage. Because of their orientation toward set standards and a propensity toward sticking to what has already been accepted as “tried and true”, they have been propagandized by liberal forces as stilted and less than intellectually capable. For many years now, liberals have managed to continue solidifying this public misconception through their dominance in public education and publicly funded social outreaches. They realized a long time ago that conservatives were not stepping up to the challenge and that social change could most effectively be accomplished by being the first to drive public perceptions of important social struggles and by targeting America’s youth. The net result has been a public perception that liberal concepts and values are popularly accepted when in fact they are not.
The tail spinning fortunes of the Girl Scouts is a perfect case in point. One episode began in Waco Texas years ago when parents there discovered a disturbing relationship between Planned Parenthood and their local troops. It seems that troop leaders had been distributing graphic sex education material to girls as young as ten years old. It wasn’t long before a local boycott of Girl Scout cookies was organized and girls began being pulled out of the program. After one troop was dissolved and another decimated, the Bluebonnet Council ended its association with Planned Parenthood. The liberal values which appear so unchallenged in the public mind were tossed into the campfire after the genuine Waco public became involved..
The founding of the American Heritage Girls is great example of what can happen when main-stream moms find an ideological minority’s values being presumed upon their daughters. Patti Garibay of Cincinnati Ohio had been a Girl Scout her entire life, as her mother had been before her. But changes had been slowly coming in the organization. As early as 1972, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. had removed “loyalty” from its oath. By 1978, they had a full-blown condom-friendly sex-ed program in place. The cookie finally began to crumble for Mrs. Garibay in 1993 when GSUSA deemed the word “God” in the Girl Scout Promise, no longer mandatory. In the following year more policy changes were handed down which included a ban on Christmas carols that referenced God or Jesus Christ. After her family had been loyal Scouts, literally for generations, Patti Garibay had to leave. As it turned out, it was the best decision she could have made. On Aug 30, 1995, Mrs. Garibay and a core group of mothers incorporated American Heritage Girls in the state of Ohio. Since then it has grown to serve thousands of girls and has chapters in at least thirty states. A.H.G. proudly acknowledgesAmerica’s Judeo-Christian heritage. According to the A.H.G. website, “Building women of integrity through service to God, family, community and country” is what they are all about. The A.H.G. Creed states, “As an American Heritage Girl I promise to be: compassionate, helpful, honest, loyal, perseverant, pure, resourceful, respectful, responsible, and reverent.”
The on-going responses to GSUSA’s pro-homosexual, pro-abortion and radical feminist activism serve to dramatically emphasize the opposite of what mainstream media and liberal law-makers would have us believe. Real life is not what is displayed on the evening news or portrayed in sit-coms, soap operas and “reality shows. The politically correct does not have to be Michigan’s future, let alone America’s. Teaching young people how to be reverent, respectful, pure and patriotic is still what tugs strongest on the hearts of most American families. It is not the smoke and mirror promises of a live-and-let-live philosophy that citizens crave; it is the faith and values exemplified by people like Patti Garibay