The Boy Scouts claim that their 1910 Scout’s oath’s phrase “morally straight” means “heterosexual.” When was the term “straight” first actually used to designate heterosexuals? I
can’t find such a usage in my 1971 version of the O.E.D.
Vern Barnet
Welcome to SDMB! I believe you should have posted this on another board.
Posting it here at the SDMB is fine, but I think you should have posted it in “General Questions”, not in “About this message board”. I’m sure a moderator will fix it soon. Welcome.
Moderator’s Notes: Yeah, what those guys said. The forum, “About This Message Board” is reserved for questions, well, about this message board. Topics here typically deal with the technical operations of the SDMB, such as they are.
The forum best suited for your topic would be our “General Questions.” That is the place for inquiries of a factual nature. To start a new thread in a particular forum, one must be on the index page of that forum. For GQ it is here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?forumid=3 Lemme bounce this thread over there for ya.
And finally, thanks for registering and I hope you enjoy your time spent here.
[Edited by UncleBeer on 08-28-2001 at 11:43 AM]
As with many other things, this has been discussed here, to death. Try doing a search of GD and The Pit. In at least one Boy Scouts thread, the question about the “morally straight” phrase has come up.
And welcome to the SDMB.
This (very long) page has this to say about the origins of “straight”:
Incidentally, the Boy Scout Handbook makes no mention of sexuality at all in its explanation of the phrase “morally straight”. The Boy Scouts policy on homosexuals has been the subject of rather extensive debate (I can think of six threads in the past month dealing with the subject) around here recently, if you want to do a search and get more info.