@girly:
Actually, lead paint covers very well compared with latex/acrylics, and is very durable. This is one of the reasons why lead paint was very suitable as a house paint and was/still is used in street signs.

I do however have to agree with BEERAD, I do not recall the "Eating ornamental badges" badge in my son's scout book, and hopefully by the time they reach.

Ummm, unless the scout is working towards the "eating ornamental badges" merit badge then this doesn't strike me as a huge problem.

It's amazing that they have such an expansive list of badges that RIAA Deputy can make the cut, yet a competitive group masturbation one still hasn't.

(still bearing the bitter, bitter scars of merit badges I'd have been entitled to if we lived in a just world)

@lockdog: I thought BSA lost their soul when they first started to create bull**** merit badges like the anti-piracy badge.

As for scouts as a whole, it seems to me they kind of lost their soul when they moved HQ from New Jersey to Texas. They went of the right wing of the deep end. A few years back they arrested the chief scout executive in an airport for trying to carry a gun on board. This is a guy who is supposed to work around and be a leader to a national youths organization. They receive tons of funding from the NRA, are blatantly partisan, and rapidly commercializing the organization and abandoning much of the camping and physical fitness focus of the scouts we might remember. I think my eagle badge was made in China, come to think of it.

Boy Scouts of America offshores the mfr of their merit badges to China?!

Surely the $0.10 in savings isn't worth it? Good job, BSA!

As bad as the Bush Republican USA flags being manufactured there. Although they didn't use lead paint for those... Guess they figured the mental incapacity was already, Mission Accomplished, as some are wont to declare.

How can they afford to put lead in everything?

I'm not amazed that we do business in China, but I am amazed that we are so lax about standards and there seems to be no thought of national security with where some of the items go.

Those were the same standards that were supposed to have been met by the scouts (girl and boy) thirty years ago. The more things you did, the better and the harder it was to get more advanced badges. I left with over 30 in total, and that was just in the first two years. Cooking, tent set up, first aide, foreign language, braiding, troup leader, troup seconder, etc etc etc.

I have forwarded this article off to a family I know who has children with scouts.