A funny "Brady's Corner" cartoon in the Washington Blade shows a quavering SpongeBob Squarepants confessing: "First they came for Bert and Ernie, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Muppet. Then they came for Tinky Winky, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Teletubby. Then they came for me..."
Yes, to our eyes, James Dobson, head of the religious right's Focus on the Family, looks ridiculous when he claims that SpongeBob's participation in an educational video remix of "We Are Family," being distributed to elementary schools to promote diversity and tolerance, is part of a cryptic "pro-homosexual" agenda. But an op-ed by Ruth Marcus, a member of the Washington Post's editorial page staff, titled "Ready to Throw in the Sponge?" raises some provocative issues that supporters of gay equality would be foolish to dismiss out of hand.
She writes, "who could resist the temptation to make fun of the alarm-sounders? Not I, certainly - how else to respond to people who work themselves into a lather over an animated talking sponge? Yet, in an odd way, I also find myself understanding some of what's bothering them."
She notes, further, that:
...if you peel away his repulsive prejudice against gays and his overheated paranoia, Dobson's stated problems with the video echo the worries of many ordinary parents, even liberal ones, that they are the losers in the culture wars and that they have been supplanted in their role by outside forces.
This phenomenon was brought home to me recently when my elementary school-age children's private school put up a photography exhibit on families with gay members.... What discomfited some of us - many of us, in fact - was the explicitness of the accompanying text describing families with bisexual and transgender parents and families with a history of incest.
This was a PC bridge too far. One day that week, I was driving the kids home and asked the innocuous question of what they had done in school. "We went up to see the exhibit and learned about transgender families," my 9-year-old answered brightly. "Will was a little confused about how the woman had the baby if she is a man." I held my breath, waiting for the 7-year-old to follow up.
...is it really necessary, absent such a predicate, to go through all this in elementary school? And whether my reaction is right or wrong, shouldn't this be a decision for me and my husband to make - not something sprung on us by our school? This is the way in which I find myself unexpectedly, and somewhat unsettlingly, aligned with the Focusers on the Family.
I'm not embracing Marcus's view of things, but I think it's
important for those who work for gay equality to understand these
fears instead of just dismissing them as "bigotry" and "hate." It
might also help to recognize that some (not all) of what
progressive activists want to preach to school kids, where they're
able to do so, can be over the line.
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