The scandal of SpongeBob SquarePants

[pegkerr]

I always thought the people who run Focus on the Family were really nutcases. Their latest public awareness campaign involves an attack on a video remake of the Sister Sledge hit "We are Family," starring SpongeBob SquarePants. Their complaint? SpongeBob SquarePants is gay. Their proof? He occasionally holds hands with his best friend Patrick, a pink starfish. Oh, and he goes Mrs. Puff's boating school. Get it? Puff. How suspicious is that?

"We see the video as an insidious means by which the organisation is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids."

It is true, perhaps, that the show has a huge gay following. SpongeBob may be "kind of special", but he was not designed to be a gay character, his creator Stephen Hillenburg has told the Wall Street Journal.

The gay community likes the show because it has a tolerant attitude, Mr Hillenburg said.

"Everybody is different, and the show embraces that. The character SpongeBob is an oddball. He's kind of weird, but he's kind of special," he said.

Another news report here.

Comments

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Well yeah. SpongeBob. The Teletubbies. Bert and Ernie. The children's television industry is obviously run entirely by the Gay Mafia and has been indoctrinating children for decades. It's a wonder there are any straight people left at all in the U.S. Thank God for Focus on the Family and Jerry Falwell. What would this country be without them?

[dejaspirit.livejournal.com]

Thank God for Focus on the Family and Jerry Falwell. What would this country be without them?

We'd be eternally grateful.

[pinnballwizzard.livejournal.com]

you guys forgot ren and stimpy

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

Obviously, what the children of America need is more Bibleman.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Davey and Goliath!

[daedala.livejournal.com]

No, no. David and Jonathan....

[cornfields.livejournal.com]

I'm just going to repost the last comment I made earlier this morning on another journal that addressed this exact same issue:

*rolls eyes* I stopped taking those (e.i., Falwell, Dobson, Robertson) "Christians" seriously a long time ago.

Tolerance = Moral Corruption!!!!!1!

Everything is an "attack" on the family. All childrens' programs are really subversive recruitment videos put out by Teh Homosechshuls and Teh Zionists. I've come to the conclusion that these "Christians" have the dirtiest minds on the planet, always looking for filth and anti-church messages everywhere they look.

(Remember the whole Disney "I can see the word 'SEX' in the dust that flies when Simba flops down on the ground!" and "Aladdin whispers, 'Good children, take off your clothes!'" debacle from the 90's? Yeah, maybe those towers in the Little Mermaid posters were a little phallic. But when I was a 10 year old girl I didn't notice that sort of stupid crap.)

I'm a Christian and a Liberal (ooh, oxymoron!), and I think both sides have taken things too far. If you don't want your children to watch Spongebob, for pete's sake, shut the damned television off. Don't get cable. Or, conversely, order a satellite system that has family friendly and faith-based programming only (http://www.skyangel.com/) so you can control what sorts of messages are sent to your children. Wow! Isn't that easy??

Just please, please, I beg of you, don't take my Spongebob away! ;)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

There was a thing a few years ago, when Zorinth was about six, about saying that Po in the tellytubbies was gay. I asked Zorinth what he thought about this, and he looked at me in total disbelief:

"Jo! He's a stuffed toy. Toys don't do sex!"

I replied that some people said he was gay because he had a handbag.

"Jo! S has a handbag, and he's not gay. And C doesn't have a handbag and he is gay. And when are we going to see S anyway?"

The really sick thing about all this is the idea that handholding among children and child-analogue things like sponges and stuffed toys, is sexualized.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

No, no, Tinky-Winky was the gay one with the handbag. Po was the one who said "Faggot, faggot, bite my bum."

You really have to wonder about the minds of people who "see" things like that. Well, no, actually you don't have to wonder, it's pretty clear how sick their minds are.

[shusu.livejournal.com]

I do wonder sometimes if the availability of sub-culture has anything to do with the increased crazy. I mean, as a long-time fanfic surfer, I know the cardinal rule is "if it squicks, it exists." There's always someone on a dare, someone with odd tastes... folk on the fringe with websites.

But the thing is, most of us who are on the Net (Internets...) on a regular basis don't validate that in the real world. I mean I've written reams of slash, but I don't try to prove that it's canon, much less shove it in someone's face. A newbie to Google may have absolutely no sense of proportion.

Honestly, if half the world knew how to use search engines, instead of paying other people to do it for them, this current state of affairs wouldn't last very long.

[chance88088.livejournal.com]

People have way too much time on their hands. We should take their cars away and make them walk everywhere. That'll keep 'em busy.

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

To add insult to injury, sponges can reproduce asexually, heterosexually, or hermaphroditically. SpongeBob is, in fact, merely the sperahead of an assault upon our sexual identity by all the porifera, of the vasty deeps!

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

Hey, omit that comma and pretend I know how to spell "spearhead."

What's worse is...

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

... SpongeBob isn't a _natural_ sponge so there's gotta be some sorta trans-something or another thing going on - to say nothing of stem cell stuff!

Evil, eeeevil!

[winterbadger]

Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin must be total flamers, then. Are we going to see Piglet on a special edition of "Queer Eye for the Straight Toys"?

:rolleyes:

[phoenixw.livejournal.com]

So basically the proof they offer really illustrates that Focus on the Family is homophobic. That kind of hypersensitivity to "gayness" and fear of tolerance is a big red flag.

*sigh*

I'm so intolerant of stupidity.

[always-up-trees.livejournal.com]

WTF.

Can nothing be just ODD anymore? JEEEEEEEEEZ, people.

[castiron.livejournal.com]

SpongeBob????

The most asexual television character I can think of?

Sheesh!

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

Yes, and that's what bothers me. If this happened to have any sort of legs, the Nick people would knuckle under and write in a girlfriend character for him.

Every once in a while, something arises from the stew of children's programming that is not total crap. I suspect that SBSP might be one of those things -- I only saw a half-hour of it and decided that it wasn't going to distract me from The Powerpuff Girls, which is the Bullwinkle of our age. If the gay comunity enjoys SBSP, it's because they have the freedom to watch children's shows and pick the good ones.

But this entire notion of placing fantasy children's characters in our context is extremely annoying to me. Sesame Street introduced Elmo because Grover was seen to be "old". I don't know what possessed Warner Brothers to do it, but when they made the Tweety movie they announced that the title character was male. When I enjoyed these shows as a child, these are not issues that even subconsciously affected me. Cartoon and puppet characters live in a world apart, without age or gender or sexual identity, and even good-natured people who misunderstand that point diminish their world and ours by conflating them.

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Heck, there already _is_ a character on SpongeBob who could vaguely be seen as a girlfriend character -- Sandy Squirrel. (Assuming she hasn't disappeared since; I've only seen a couple DVDs of the show.) But SpongeBob is so innocent that I can't imagine him doing any hanky-panky with any gender, species, or whatever.

Fantasia on Tinky-Winky

[bohemianspirit.livejournal.com]

I always thought the people who run Focus on the Family were really nutcases.

They are. And Dobson is a megalomaniacal (I think I spelled that right) nutcase, very scary. Like when he told, was it Stephanopolous, that he knows nothing about "Christians" -- never mind that whoever it was is the son of an Orthodox priest, or some such thing.

I don't know if you ever perused the doggerel section of my web site, but I've got a little piece about Tinky-Winky that may warm your heart:

For the fanatically homophobic, Tinky-Winky the Purple Purse-Bearer
inspires fear, loathing, and, well, maybe something else as well...

Fantasia on Tinky-Winky

What lies concealed in that Trojan purse?
What makes that triangle chime?
"Again! Again!" from your lips
To mine would be sublime.

Begone! Thou purple demon!
Thou temptest me to stray
From the straight, the narrow mind.
Silence, thou beguiling lay!

This roly-poly fiend of hell
Frolics, heedless to my cry.
I gaze, entranced, into his navel—
O, surely damned am I!

And yet, how sweet to hear that voice
Softly croon, "Again. Again."
If good intentions lead to hell,
I am sure to go to heaven.

Copyright © 1999 Karyn Milos. ... but feel free to pass it around. ;-)

[halibut.livejournal.com]

I have a very special spot of disdain and contempt in my heart for Focus on the Family. Not least because they're supposedly co-religionists. But that's just ridiculous.

*sigh* - I had a colleague the other day say that "Teletubbies is bad for kids because one of the characters is gay." Bleh.

Love the poem above though :-D

i hate fundamentalists

[(Anonymous)]

i hate fundamentalist christians... they are the most corrupt thing that exist... the church is the most corrupt thing tha you'll see in your life... so... christians need to evolve and realize that the children TV is not corrupt and that there's not anohter mafia but the christian mafia, the mafia of the church... the mafia of the monkeys...
i am just asking christians not to be that monkey-minded what actually means that you shouldn't believe in church... because that's the real mafia (gay mafia... bleh...) and i'm not gay, i'm just a homo sapiens sapiens... and as an homo sapiens sapiens i just do believe in credible things... and that bullshit bout alladin... ROFLMAO if the word "SEX" was there... what would that do to a 4 aged kid who cans not even read!!!... and if the inconcient mind of an 8 aged kid read that... what would that change in him?? "ohhh... the word sex..." and what else? cuz he wouldn't become a gay just because of that!!! that's really nuts... and it's really nuts to look for such an idiot thing.... it had to be the church... rofl...
see ya... i hope the world to evolve some day and reveal against that stupid church...

I forgot to mention earlier...

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

...but Nile Rogers (evil Red stooge behind the -shudder- tolerance video) also put together a "We Are The World" style recording of "We Are Family" shortly after September 11th. I've a copy of the DVD (which includes Spike Lee's music video & comes with a CD of the recording), let me know if you'd like to borrow it.

How can you go wrong with something that inclues Earth Kitt, Mathew Modine, Joan Osborne, Polly Bergen, Queen Latifah, & David Hasselhoff?

(For those interested the DVD is a Tommy Boy Films production & it looks like the serial' number is TB-1558-9, copyright 2002, and their website is http://www.tommyboy.com)