SpongeBob sexuality sparks absurd debate

So SpongeBob Square-Pants is gay. You think your small children, who may be glued to the TV set this morning, were just enthralled by a talking yellow sponge in suit pants. You'd be wrong. Actually, they are being brainwashed by a vast network of gay cartoon characters bent on destroying civilization as we know it.

SpongeBob isn't alone. Tinky Winky was the first to be “outed.” Tinky may have seemed just like those other three fuzzy Teletubbies, harmless enough except for their uncanny power to send adults screaming from the room. Think again: Tinky is purple. His antenna is a triangle, the gay pride symbol, and he carries a purse-like bag. Get it?

Here's how we learned about SpongeBob.

“Does anyone here know SpongeBob?” Dr. James Dobson asked darkly, addressing a black-tie audience at one of Tuesday's inaugural events. Dobson is the founder of Focus on the Family, one of the nation's most outspoken conservative Christian groups. Sponge-Bob holds hands with his starfish pal Patrick, and likes to watch the imaginary television show “The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.” Evidence enough, to Dobson at any rate, that the guy's a menace.

SpongeBob's rep is that he's a nice guy — a pushover even — who tries to get along with everyone, even Squidward, his gruff neighbor. The Sponge has indeed become something of a camp figure among gay men. But his nice-guy mien is what prompted an educational-film maker to star SpongeBob in a short video for young children about multiculturalism called “We Are Family.” The video promotes a “tolerance pledge”' for schoolkids that could extend to sexual identity.

One person's definition of tolerance is another's “pro-homosexual” agenda. “We see the video ... as manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids,” Dobson's spokesperson told The New York Times on Wednesday. “It's a classic bait and switch.”

Chiming in, a homosexuality detection expert at the similarly conservative Family Research Council called words such as “tolerance” and “diversity” part of a “coded language that is regularly used by the homosexual community.”

Forget prime-time raunchiness — Janet Jackson's pixelated nipple or Nicollette Sheridan's towel drop on “Monday Night Football”' The real threat lurks in the morning cartoons.

So don't get us started on Jimmy Neutron. Or Mr. Rogers, one of whose signature phrases was, suspiciously, “people can like you just because you're you.”

--This editorial appeared in
the Los Angeles Times