Crafts Are Not Her Idea of Fun

When Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scout movement at the turn of the century, he warned against the threat of a condition he called “girlitis.”

Scouts could have fun, allowed the British cavalry officer, so long as it was manly fun.

Katrina Yeaw is a girl. Although she does not consider that to be a contagious condition, the 12-year-old blames the organization’s institutional fear of “girlitis” for keeping her out of the Boy Scouts.

“I know a lot of boys who like girls, who like to do things with girls. My twin brother, Daniel, is not afraid to do things with me, so why are they?”

She went to court after she was rejected as a member of her brother’s troop. With her lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America still awaiting a trial date, Katrina and her family are set to appear in Sacramento County Superior Court today to seek an injunction forcing one of the sixth-grader’s local Boy Scout troops to admit her now.

Katrina, who lives in the small Northern California town of Rocklin, has charged the Boy Scouts and its Sacramento-based Golden Empire Council with violating her civil rights by excluding her from membership. Her suit is believed to be the third nationally to challenge the boys-only status of the Boy Scouts of America, but is the first of its kind to be brought under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.

Boy Scout troops in other countries are open to girls and, even in the United States, girls and women are welcomed into the Explorer program for 14- to 21-year-olds. But national Scout officers have defended the organization’s restrictions on younger girls as socially appropriate and legally sound.

“Our programs are for boys, not for girls,” says Richard W. Walker, national spokesman for the Texas-based Boy Scouts of America. “Ours are value-oriented programs developed over 86 years to meet the physical, psychological and emotional needs of boys.

“There are other organizations for girls throughout the country, and Katrina Yeaw could find them in her own backyard,” Walker says.

But Katrina says she has sampled those programs and found them, in two words, “not fun.” According to this athletic blond, there are no age-appropriate Girl Scout troops near her home. And when she joined Camp Fire Girls briefly last year, she found their “artsy-craftsy” activities unworthy of the required 40-minute round trip from her home.

“I know what Boy Scouts do. My brother told me. They camp overnight and hike and learn important things about the wilderness and surviving outdoors. That’s all I want to do--just the same fun stuff I already know I like to do,” Katrina says.

In the last several years, say her parents, Katrina has blossomed into a serious hiker and horseback rider. Most days after school, she rushes to a nearby stable to saddle up Gambit, an Arabian who doesn’t care whether she is a girl or a boy.

“She is not a tomboy--never has been--and like every other girl her age, she has a big poster of Brad Pitt on her bedroom door,” says Katrina’s mother, Gretjen Yeaw. “But she really loves everything about the outdoors. Personally, I am a traditional stay-at-home mom whose idea of camping fun is a Marriott Hotel. But I find the Boy Scouts’ position here to be ridiculously old-fashioned.”

Katrina’s suit is the latest in a series of legal assaults against the Boy Scouts and its tradition-steeped admissions standards, which, one San Francisco columnist joked recently, exclude “the three Gs: girls, gays and the godless.”

Defending the Boy Scouts as a private organization with a constitutional right to select members and leaders with similar beliefs and lifestyles, Scout attorneys have successfully fended off suits by little boys who don’t believe in God, little girls who do, gay men who wanted to be troop leaders and even women volunteers. Courts have generally ruled that Boy Scouts of America is indeed a private group with a right to free association.

In 1988, after several high-profile suits by single mothers who protested that there were no dads willing to lead their sons’ troops, the Boy Scouts officially opened its leadership ranks to women.

That’s not a problem for Katrina. Her father, James, is a veteran of scouting and would be an enthusiastic volunteer if it weren’t for his daughter’s exclusion. He discouraged Katrina’s early efforts to join the Boy Scouts, but supported her idea to form a separate girls’ patrol within her brother’s troop. “She went out and found other girls who wanted to join, with the idea of offering a compromise,” says James Yeaw.

But the Boy Scouts would have none of it.

According to Katrina’s attorney, Gloria Allred of Los Angeles, the Boy Scouts have never looked beyond her client’s gender in evaluating her application. “She was rejected solely because she is a girl and that is why we filed suit. This violates the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which protects the rights of girls to be free of sex discrimination by businesses such as the Boy Scouts.”

Daniel wrote a supporting statement for his sister’s lawsuit, saying girls “can contribute like every other person. I don’t see any reason why girls cannot be in a patrol and participate in activities just like the guys do in my patrol.” Because of the controversy surrounding Katrina’s 8-month-old lawsuit, her brother says he no longer feels comfortable going to his troop meetings. In fact, Daniel says, he’s grown tired of talking about the subject.

“A lot of friends still ask me at school why she’s doing this, and I used to explain everything about how sad it made her feel and stuff. Now,” Daniel says, “I just tell them, ‘Ask my sister.’ ”

And what does Katrina say?

“What can I say? I was born a girl and that’s the whole reason for this whole thing. Can you believe it?”