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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2049 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Via evolving parenthood experience, it's recently come to my attention that the Boy Scouts no longer exist, but rather a co-ed institution called "Scouting America". Boys and girls welcomed equally. No scout troop for males only.

Girl Scouts? Same as it ever was. Girls only.

How is this not a layup discrimination lawsuit? I can't even find any online discourse about it; any attempt to Google the topic simply directs me to the scouts "anti-discrimination" efforts.

edit: I was tragically unaware that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are two independent organizations. The naming structure led me to assume that they operated under a common parent organization, and we all know what happens when you assume...

Many anti-discrimination laws have carve-outs with reasonings like "to redress historical injustices" etc., which is how womens' groups of all kinds remain legal.

Technically, aren't most of these groups private clubs, who can be as discriminatory as they like? You can have your white men’s club just as much as you want(although dues are likely well beyond your price range).

You can have your white men’s club just as much as you want

Ha. Good one.

They literally exist. Many fraternities and unions are this in practice, a few country clubs maintain it as explicit policy, and of course there’s the hells angels.

a few country clubs maintain it as explicit policy

which ones?

there’s the hells angels

no, the hell's angels are not explicitly whites only

Most outlaw biker clubs took the "whites only" language out of their charters back in the 90s when they realized half their members (and approximately all of their wives) were actually Mexican. I doubt the Hell's Angels still have it in there, but there are probably a few still around with the old rules.

you base this on what?

my limited experience is talking to a client of mine who ran in that scene; the mexicans were with other clubs and gangs which they feuded with

when you're at the point where you're trying to come up with examples for "white men's clubs" existing and you come up with outlaw biker gangs and even then it's not true since the 90s, maybe we can just admit that explicitly white men's groups are de facto illegal and treated like criminals

In most states, it is legal for a 30 year old man to marry a 16 year old girl. Not only that, such marriages were pretty common 150+ years ago, and no one thought anything much about it. Here’s the thing: while I in theory have no problem with a 30 year old marrying a 16 year old, I can’t help but notice that most 30 year olds who are interested in marrying 16 year olds today are creeps. That age gap has become so uncommon and socially frowned upon, that almost the only guys who pursue it are antisocial weirdos that I don’t really want to hang out with.

Likewise, I don’t have a problem with the existence of private, monoracial clubs. In some ways, I can even see the appeal. But whites-only clubs are even more frowned upon than 30/16 marriages, so any such club is going to pretty much exclusively attract an audience of schizophrenics, neo-Nazis, feds, and other undesirables who I don’t particularly want to spend time around.

I don’t think most people have thought about it in quite the same terms that I have, but I think most people have arrived at the same conclusion. Until that changes, whites-only clubs are going to be pretty thin on the ground, even if they remain technically legal, because schizos, neo-Nazis, and feds tend not to build durable, attractive organizations.

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I have an old friend who was a fully patched member of one of the larger California clubs in the 2000s/2010s who I got a lot of stories from. So I'm getting old timer lore secondhand, and things may have gone down very differently in different parts of the country, but it tracks with the demographics I've seen at the barbecues and whatnot I was invited to. And "never ask a white supremacist the race of his girlfriend" is a very old joke for a reason.

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