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The Boys Scouts of America have their charges pledge to be, among other things, "morally straight." And moral straightness to the Boy Scouts seems to include bigotry towards Scouts who are gay or atheists. The dimensions of moral straightness were recently made even clearer in a dispute between the Boy Scouts and the Unitarian-Universalist church.

One of the honors that Scouts can achieve is something called the "Religion in Life" award, which is given to Scouts who have completed a program of religious education in their own churches. For many years, Scouts who belonged to Unitarian-Universalists churches earned this badge with no problem. However, this summer the Boy Scouts of America removed the authority of Unitarian-Universalist churches to participate in the program. What was their offense? The education material used in the churches restates the long-standing Unitarian-Universalist opposition to discrimination against gay and lesbian people, and specifically mentions the ban on gay Scouts as an instance of such discrimination.

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The fact that the church had the temerity to criticize Scouting policy in its educational material sent the Boy Scouts of America into a fit of pique, and they yanked the Unitarian-Universalist churches from the Religion in Life program in retaliation. Essentially, the Boy Scout leadership decided to punish boys from Unitarian-Universalist families because the leaders of the church publicly disagreed with them. So much for "moral straightness."

But what is "moral straightness" anyway, and why should we aspire to it? The language of Western metaphor generally ascribes positive values to that which is straight. In the Bible, John the Baptist comes to "make straight the way of the Lord," and we are told that in the last days, "the crooked shall become straight." Even today, some youth who abstain from drugs, alcohol, and sex label themselves "Straight Arrows."

But this is a metaphor that we need to consider carefully. Straightness is almost always an artificial construction of the human mind. No part of the human body is truly straight-- it is all one curve, one gentle angle after another. The trees outside are not truly straight either; they all bend, curve, and swell in ways that don't reduce to simple lines on a page. Nothing living is straight because straightness is foreign to the organic.

In the abstractions of the mind lie things that cannot exist in the real world: perfect circles, equilateral triangles, straight lines that extend into infinity. And the inventions of the mind can be as beautiful as a Euclidean proof. But we need to be wary of judging people deficient when they fail to measure up to our mental abstractions. The abstract conception of "moral straightness" contains beliefs about our religious and sexual lives that is strongly at variance with what real people actually feel in their hearts. And rather than condemn those who fail to match these conceptions as "bent," "kinky," or "crooked," we need to think more carefully about moral abstractions that condemn entire classes of people as unworthy of belonging to our communities.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Mitch confronts Blanche Dubois with the truth about her past, saying, "I thought you was straight." Blanche replies, "What is straight? A line can be straight or a street. But the heart of a human being?"