This is just ridiculous:
Homophobes Give Love Sponge a Bad Reputation
Here’s the deal: SpongeBob, along with pals Dora the Explorer, Arthur and the Rugrats, among others, got together in New York on Nov. 10 to tape a video remix of the Sister Sledge disco hit “We Are Family.”
Nile Rodgers, who co-wrote the song, set up The We Are Family Foundation (www.wearefamilyfoundation. org) as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Its mission is to “celebrate our common humanity.” As part of that, the video aims “to promote tolerance and diversity to America’s children.”
The foundation is sending the music video, which includes a message about “the importance of togetherness embodied in the word ‘family,’” along with a teaching guide to 61,000 elementary schools. It hopes the schools will air and discuss the video March 11. With the backing of former Sen. Robert Dole and Sen. Orrin Hatch, the group is proposing March 11 as National We Are Family Day.
I’m not seeing a nefarious plot.
In fact, the packet doesn’t include the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Tolerance Pledge, though it is on the We Are Family Web site.
“Tolerance is a personal decision that comes from a belief that every person is a treasure,” the pledge begins. It ends with, “I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own.”
The talk of a mass “tolerance pledge” first surfaced on WorldNetDaily (www.worldnetdaily.com) in a story headlined “SpongeBob, Barney promote ‘gay’ tolerance.”
In it, American Family Association (www.afa.net) spokesman Ed Vitagliano charged that “homosexual activists are using popular children’s TV characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Barney the Dinosaur to surreptitiously indoctrinate young children into their lifestyle.”
Now, I'm no Sponge Bob expert, but if he's encouraging kids to live in a pineapple under the sea, okay. That's the closest thing I've been able to see towards persuading kids toward a certain "lifestyle." I fail to see, however, how any of it could be construed as homosexual. At all.
Where do these wackos get off in making accusations like this? Were they sitting around watching cartoons with their grandkids and realized that they got an erection from watching the interplay between Sponge Bob and Patrick? Remove the rafter from thine own eye!
And this horrifying pledge: God forbid that kids pledge to have respect for people different from them. Wouldn't that be awful? But you know, I've got a pretty fundamentalist-type Christian background (the doctrines and behaviors of which I repudiate), and I still can't remember Jesus Christ not showing respect for anyone, regardless of their "sins."
Typical of the fundies, don't you think?