I have a boolean field in mysql (tinyint) which I want to use as a scope restriction for acts_as_list acts_as_list :scope => ''featured = #{featured}'' however, there is a problem here as when Rails generates SQL query for this it supplements true/false for #{featured} which raises error in mysql As a workaround I created dummy attributes that return 1/0 depending on featured being true/false. The question is, whether this is a bug or not? I would assume ActiveRecord should not use true/false if mysql does not understand this.