A group of Eagle Scouts protested the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) anti-gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and queer policies and heteronormative citizenship ideals by forfeiting their badges, divesting their membership, and writing personal, emotionally charged letters addressed to the BSA to critique the institution from within. Engaging the correspondence elucidates the repertoires of critique and dissent they use in their in-house protests. To these ends, this paper makes four primary contributions: it (re)calls attention to the correspondence archive as a fruitful site to explore political speech acts and forms of dissent; it supplies an understanding of the politics of emotions in protest and social change efforts, thus adding to resonant dialogues in social movement studies; it codifies the Eagle Scouts’ particular tactics used in their in-house protests, captured in the terms “symbolic divestment” and “recuperative critique”; and it supplies a case study that details the rhetorical mechanisms of intrainstitutional change.