Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Lifestyle? What exactly is the gay “life style”?
Right. If muppets without genitals can be “gay,” then Bert and Ernie have always been as gay as could be, if you want them to be. But it’s a definitional question; it doesn’t actually make any difference.
For their context, in what sense is that insufficient, right there? What else would they be doing?
Support for gay marriage is not a religious position. Too bad if you’re offended by it. You don’t have a right to not be offended.
I signed the petition, by the way. Not because I think it will happen, but just as a lark. It would be hilarious and harmless, so why not?
This doesn’t mean anything at all. There are real couples that sleep in separate beds. There have been human couples depicted on TV as sleeping in separate beds. And most importantly, there’s no reason to think that “gayness” between muppets would have anything to do with anything that would take place in a bed, anyway.
It’s not a religious issue just because religious people don’t like it. Some religious people think it’s wrong to not wear a hat.
That said, this is silly. It’s similar to when people complained about what Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson might be doing when they weren’t fighting crime. The answer, of course, is “nothing”. It’s not as if they had real lives, aspects of which comic artists chose not to portray in the comics.
No. But it’s a facile and intellectually dishonest argument to say that they are only going to be on Sesame Street because gays exist. It’s because they want to show it to children as a normal and acceptable way for two guys (or gals) to exist.
Crackheads and people with serious mental illnesses exist. The guy who works at a slaughterhouse exists, and yet I seem to have missed the episode where Elmo learns how sausage is made. I could go through a far less racy list of people who don’t “exist” on Sesame street, but the whole point of putting a gay couple on a children’s show is to normalize them at an early age before they become teenagers and go, “I’m all for civil rights, but two guys? Icky icky gross gross!!”
Iunno, all I remember from Sesame Street as a kid was Basil the bear looking like one of my stuffed animals, and that there was some orange thing that talked with some Joual accent about recycling. Kudos to these six year olds who were already thinking about sexual orientation, I guess!
It IS a normal and acceptable way to exist.
And how would many of you react if a tax supported enity came out against homosexuality? The roar protesting religious establishment would be deafening. One more time, homosexuals have the right to their lifestyle, but not tax paid advocacy.
One more time, just what exactly is the homosexual “lifestyle”?
There is no “both sides;” some children have gay parents. They do. It is legal in New York now, and it would be appropriate for a kid’s show set there to acknowledge that fact. The world is full of bigoted assholes telling these children there is something wrong with their families; it would be a nice thing for Sesame Street to do a nod to the FACT that these families exist, and the children raised in these homes are normal and fine.
Legal gay marriage is a fact in New York. They have “tax paid advocacy;” they receive the tax breaks, the state is on their side. Besides the fact that Sesame Street receives little to no public funding; PBS as a whole does, but Sesame Street is makes plenty of money and supports itself, as least as much as a church does as it sucks off the government teat with it’s enormous tax breaks. I think it’s more than fair.
Portraying them existing is advocacy now?
About the same way as I’d react if a tax supported entity came out against heterosexuality.
FWIW: Sesame Street didn’t seem to have any problem depicting hetero-weddings in a positive light. I don’t recall any uproar about “heterosexual advocacy” from a public institution.
And IIRC, Sesame Street isn’t really a “tax-supported” institution, their a non-profit funded by merchandising their characters and the Carnegie institute.
So what do they do, introduce the gay couple as moving in next door to the leader of the Westboro Muppet Church, the Rev. Fred Phelts?
Not everybody wants neighborhood integration (to say nothing of school integration) displayed to their children as normative, either, for that matter. I’m having a difficult time finding a reason to take their opinions on the subjects seriously.
Nah, he’d be Phred Felts and he’d be made from felt. He would picket Mr Hooperman’s funeral.
Unfortunately, however, their primary broadcast outlets, PBS stations do receive federal funding, through the CPB.
If somebody is batshit enough, that’s enough for them to claim that their hard-earned dollars are being used to spread filth and immorality.
There is no prohibition on tax paid advocacy of equality. It’s not a religious position. It’s immaterial that this offends you. The state is likewise not prohibited from advocating racial equality or condemning antisemitism, regardless of how offended Christian Identity or Nation of Islam get about it.
The OP sums it up for me. I have no idea why anyone would want to change the show.
I don’t think anyone’s argued that having a gay couple on Sesame Street should be some sort of constitutional guarantee, so the whole “rights” angle seems to be a strawman.
If a tax supported entity came out against homosexuality, I’d be pretty outraged. I would not, however, make the mistake of arguing that the entity had no right to come out against homosexuality. The religious angle is, again, a strawman. If a tax supported entity came out on either side of the gay rights debate for explicitly religious reasons, I’d have a problem with that. “God hates fags” and “Jesus loves everyone” are both unacceptable positions for the government to take.