Re: Sexually Ambiguous Cartoon Characters
Roscoe, corps only push people around if they let them.<br /><br />Who do you blame, the parents or the corps?<br /><br />From what I heard, spongebob didnt say to accept gays, it was more of a tolerate gays. I can live with that, cause the bible teaches us exactly that.<br /><br />***************************************<br />Below is an editorial I found with more info, that I dont necessarily agree with.<br />*****************************************<br />Christian conservatives, in their ongoing anti-gay tirade, again have their knickers in a wad, focusing on SpongeBob SquarePants, a cartoon character easy to dislike (because he's an annoying dork), but not for the reason the right dislikes him.<br /><br />SpongeBob, as asexual a character as there ever was, has come under attack for promoting a most unchristian characteristic, tolerance.<br /><br />He is among characters due to appear in a video remake of the 1979 Sister Sledge song, "We Are Family," due for March distribution to 61,000 or so public and private schools.<br /><br />With other kid-friendly personnel such as Arthur, Bob the Builder, Jimmy Neutron, Barney, Clifford, Blues Clues, Lilo & Stitch, Madeline, the Rugrats, Winnie the Pooh, the Muppets, various Sesame Street folk, Bill Cosby, Diana Ross and Whoopi Goldberg, the program will promote diversity and tolerance, encouraging kids to pledge "respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own."<br /><br />Shocking stuff.<br /><br />Among sponsors are FedEx (which will deliver all the videos) and the Anti-Defamation League. The show also will air on Nickelodeon, PBS and the Disney Channel - if not submarined by the powerfully intolerant right.<br /><br />Our neighbor to the north, James Dobson's Focus on the Family, labels the We Are Family promotion as "bait-and-switch," "insidious" and aimed at "brainwashing" young people. Dobson objects to "the way in which those childhood symbols are apparently being hijacked to promote an agenda that involves teaching homosexual propaganda to children."<br /><br />The odd little sponge now joins others in the right's McCarthy-era-like persecution of characters like Murphy Brown and the Teletubbies' Tinky Winky.<br /><br />Come on, now.<br /><br />Gays and lesbians are not the downfall of the human race. One aspect of their lives may or may not differ from - but does not threaten - the norm, and yet they have been defined and identified by that solitary difference. By and large, gays and lesbians are the same as anyone else: They love and hate, work and loaf, buy and go into debt, care and not care, vote Democrat or Republican, go to church or not, pay or avoid taxes, like or dislike war. They are less apt to molest children than straights, and, given the chance, are as able to be good parents (or bad) and good neighbors (or bad) as you and I.<br /><br />What they do for recreation is of no concern to any other human, any more than what Mr. and Mrs. Upright do. Do we worry about what neighbors Adam and Eve do when the lights are out? Why should we worry about Adam and Steve, or Adelaide and Eve, all consenting adults?<br /><br />Should we, in our intolerance, also despise and undo the workings and contributions of earlier known or "suspected" gays, lesbians and bisexuals such as Socrates, Plato, DaVinci, Michelangelo, Bacon, Lord Byron, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tchaikovsky, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, John Maynard Keynes, Cole Porter, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Frieda Kahlo and Andy Warhol?<br /><br />In this newfound era of moral values, we'd do well as Americans and, yes, as Christians, to leave behind intolerance and focus instead on moral values of genuine import: poverty, hunger, a war's pointless carnage, enhancing the commitment of male-female marriage and worrying less about the commitment of same-sex couples.<br /><br />Tolerance is a simple ideal; it needn't be foreign to any person of any faith.<br /><br />Alas, it is.
