This is the time of year I’ll hear soft knocks at my door.
They are from darling little girls proudly wearing their green sashes and beaming smiles selling cookies. And adults or older siblings usually accompany them.
Each year I buy 4 boxes of cookies: Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Patties, Chocolate Chips and Dulce de Leche. This year the Girls Scouts are selling their first gluten-free cookie-Chocolate Chip Shortbread- and I'll buy five.
The thought of Girl Scout cookies, an ubiquitous symbol of the organization and an American staple like Apple pie, made nearly $700 million in sales since 1999, has helped fund abortions at Planned Parenthood is unfathomable.
But with Religious Right activists fishing for another fallacious assertion to try on the American public this one unfortunately has legs.
And the Religious Right has dubbed their pro-life battle "cookie-cott," imploring Christians to rebuff beguiling bright-eyed girl scouts selling the organization’s pro-choice cash cow.
The Religious Right not only has a problem with little girls selling cookies who might one day grow up and be this nation’s future leaders, but the Religious Right also have a problem with women already in leadership positions as role models.
"The Girl Scouts recently commended pro-abortion politicians Wendy Davis and Kathleen Sebelius as worthy role models for our children. In response, we're asking you to boycott Girl Scout cookies in 2014," on cookcott.com
The abortion issue is the Religious Rights ploy to hide their misogyny cloaked as a moral imperative to protect the unborn fetus.
Not surprisingly, heterosexist pastors and right-wing radio hosts Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner are both leading the clarion call on "cookie-cott,"because GSUSA according to them is being “antithetical to a biblical vision for womanhood.”
However, in the face of proving them wrong neither shows any compunction to abate their lies and actions, but rather to continue their misogynistic diatribes.
"The individualism of feminism has been devastating to this country. I’d say you ought to say no to the Girl Scout cookies, too," Swanson told Right Wing Watch. "I don’t want to support lesbianism, I don’t want to support Planned Parenthood and I don’t want to support abortion, and if that be the case I’m not buying Girl Scout cookies."
Proof of their claim is the recent hire of Krista Kokjohn-Poehler in October 2013 as the organization's Chief Girl Experience Officer. And what further outrages the Religious Right is that Kokjohn-Poehler's is not only a lesbian but also a married one, at that, having joined her surname with her spouse's.
Although the GSUSA national headquarters has emphatically denied they are in bed with Planned Parenthood or their affiliates, Religious Right opponents continually contest that the organization doesn't want to own up to the fact that their local Girl Scout councils, and teen subsidiaries are.
Sadly, for the Girl Scouts this is becoming in many ways a losing battle with the Religious Right. The Religious Right has successfully generated a decline in local cookie sales in states across the country, a loss, to date, of over a half million members, and $4.9 million dollars. And the Religious Rights success according to Gallop is that the country, surprisingly, is leaning more and more to the right: “conservative Americans (40%) outnumbered both moderates (35%) and liberals (21%).”
Underneath this bogus claim by the Religious Right that GSUSA is a pro-abortion organization is merely a right-wing zealot resistance toward modernity and the inevitable changes it brings.
For example, in 1917 when the first African American girl scout troop was founded many of the ancestors of today's Religious Right protested this like they are now over the inclusion of LGBT scouts.
Empowering little girls with confidence and self- belief ensures us of a futuregeneration of strong women as role models. And if purchasing boxes of Girl Scout cookies assist them along the way that's the least any of us can do.