When our sweet little neighbor in her brown camp uniform came knocking on our door this year, we had to say no. I told her mother that I didn’t want to hurt Katie’s feelings, but I couldn’t support the Girl Scout cookie sale anymore because I’d learned too much about the organizers’ agenda, primarily their support for abortion and partnership with Planned Parenthood.

I worried that my “political” stand would cause uneasiness between us, but her response put me at ease: “Well,” she said, “they do use unpaid child labor to make their sales, and the troop only gets 10 percent of the revenues anyway.”

True. According to the Girl Scouts’ website, the lion’s share of the money goes not to the troop but to bureaucrats up the chain of command in multicounty councils. The national office gets a piece of the pie, too, in the form of royalties based on gross annual sales volume - about 200 million boxes per year.

It’s a sacrifice, because I love the cookies and the cuties who sell them, but enough is enough.

I remember the Girl Scouts being flaky way back in the early 1970s. When I was a Brownie, I was told to recite some chant and step over a mirror. If I had known the word, I would have called it “pagan.” Even an unchurched girl of 7 could smell a rat.

Last year, the... http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/16/say-no-to-girl-scout-coo...