• Okay so i was watching ABC news or something like that, i was gonig to change the channel because i rarely watch ABC news but right then tom brokaw says, Buster the bunny budget as been cut because of the show including two lesbian parents, on the postcard poriton of the show, for those of you who have never seen the show it has a cartoon porition then a porition of kids that send in video postcards of their family and the show aris them it's normally of different religions and races showing how they live in their culture. things of that sort. so the kids send in the video, and shockingly ABC shows us the video, and NO WHERE in the video did they or the kid say she had two lesbian parents! AT ALL! the only way kids would have gotten that they where gay is if someone told them or the telvision show told them, which did happen. the kids watching would have been clueless, unless they were knowlegeable about gays.
  

Chicago Tribune

 

The virtuous vs. SpongeBob

Kathleen Parker, Knight Ridder/Tribune. Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune newspaper
Published January 26, 2005

Among the many blessings I have failed to fully appreciate is my exemption--thanks to my children's advanced years--from having to know much about SpongeBob SquarePants.

Until recently, I've been only blandly aware of the cartoon character and his underwater cohorts. I've now learned that SpongeBob--an otherwise blithering sea sponge--is really a covert operative for The Homosexual Agenda.

For those otherwise distracted, SpongeBob is the protagonist in both a movie and a television series. Hugely popular among the kindergartener-2nd grade set, he sometimes holds hands with heroes Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, which supposedly accounts for SpongeBob's reputed popularity among gays.

And hence the notion that his appearance in a new video, "We Are Family"--aimed at teaching schoolchildren about diversity and tolerance--is really a subterfuge for the pro-homosexual agenda.

The SpongeBob saga has gained plenty of attention--what with gay activists on one side and heaven's gatekeepers on the other. James Dobson, founder of the conservative Christian lobbying group Focus on the Family, said the video promotes a pro-homosexual agenda. The American Family Association's Ed Vitagliano wrote in the conservative Christian "family values" advocacy group's journal that the project's subtext is celebrating homosexuality.

The video, scheduled to be aired next month on networks and distributed to 61,000 schools, was conceived shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way of teaching tolerance in a hate-filled world, say its creators. The idea was that teaching children in their tender years to respect differences would pay off in the long run, leading to a cheerier world in which, presumably, Middle Eastern religious nuts wouldn't fly planes into buildings.

Somehow, I think they've missed their target audience, but never mind. Making the video doubtless made many grownups feel better about their own sorrows and helped move them toward that utopian finale so favored by the bracelet-and-ribbon-wearing population: Healing 'n' Closure.

There's now a We Are Family Foundation, a Web site (wearefamilyfoundation.org), a letter-writing campaign urging that March 11 be declared national "We Are Family Day" and, of course, ways to contribute money.

In fact, SpongeBob plays a minor role in the video and seems to have been unfairly impugned. While I vigorously favor protecting children from phase-inappropriate discussions of sexuality, I don't see it here. That said, there's still plenty to cringe about if you're more sympathetically inclined toward "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's" Randle Patrick McMurphy than Nurse Mildred Ratched.

What Dobson, Vitagliano and others really are objecting to is that kids viewing the video might be inspired to visit the "We Are Family" Web site and happen upon the Tolerance Pledge, by which one promises to respect all people, even those whose "abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own."

Respecting all people is hardly a radical idea for Christians, but Dobson says on his Web site that inclusion of sexual identity in the pledge "crosses a moral line." Personally, I'm still puzzling over "other characteristics." In any case, the pledge seems unlikely to traumatize children, who probably won't find it interesting, if they find it at all. It isn't mentioned in the video and is available only on the foundation's Web site.

If teachers decide to incorporate the Tolerance Pledge into their class curriculum, then that's a matter for closer scrutiny and Dobson is right. In the meantime, there's no coercion here. We're unlikely to witness droves of brainwashed tykes reciting diversity pledges to the annoyance of their beer-swilling parents.

And it would be annoying, let's be clear.

What the SpongeBob controversy has revealed is that pledging allegiance to diversity and tolerance is religion by any other name--just as irksome to the devout as Dobson and Vitagliano are to the secular. The purveyors of Feel Good Vibes can be just as dogmatic and unyielding as those who condemn from the pulpit. Whether defending literal scripture or advancing bumper-sticker virtue, the self-anointed protectorate are essentially cut from the same cloth.

And they're likely bound for similar rewards. For what we know about human beings is that people tend to resist that which is imposed from on high. By some natural law that we might call "SpongeBob's Ironic Rule of Reverse Effects," channelers of piety usually exact the opposite of what they intend.

There's nothing like a preacher railing against sin to whet one's appetite for iniquity. And there's nothing like force-feeding children a diet of dogma to turn the little darlings into intolerant totalitarian tyrants. Or angry renegades who will seek an outlet for their rage.

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Sesame Street legal: Furore over Bert and Ernie gay flick

Children's Television Workshop gets steamed up over Sundance-shown queer spoof

Guardian Unlimited
Wednesday April 10, 2002

Lawyers acting for the beloved kids' show Sesame Street have targeted director Peter Spears over his short film, Ernest and Bertram, which depicts the show's puppet stars Bert and Ernie as gay lovers.

ABC News reports that Spears' film, which screened at Sundance this year, takes the form of a mockumentary and ends with Ernie committing suicide. But the Children's Television Workshop - the folks behind Sesame Street - are objecting to Spears' portrait of their child-like, bickering muppets as angst-ridden homosexuals. With the threat of legal action looming, it now seems unlikely that Ernest and Bertram will be screened in public for the forseeable future.

Gossip about the private life of the pointy-headed, pedantic Bert and the benign, cuddly Ernie is nothing new. Back in 1993, CTW even went so far as to issue a statement which appeared to insist that the duo were red-blooded Sesame straights: "Bert and Ernie, who've been on Sesame Street for 25 years, do not portray a gay couple, and there are no plans for them to do so in the future. They are puppets, not humans."

But the revelations peddled in Spears' mockumentary is just the latest in a run of bizarre stories swirling around the ill-fated muppets. Late last year, Bert achieved a notoriety his creators could never have envisiaged when he became the unwitting star of the spoof Bert is Evil website, which portrayed the pointy one as a machiavellian genius who consorted with Jerry Springer and the Ku Klux Klan.

At one stage, the muppet even became the focus for anti-US protests in the wake of September 11. Apparently inspired by the website, thousands of pro-Taliban protesters in Bangladesh brandished placards which featured the hapless Bert superimposed alongside Osama Bin Laden.