Cartoon characters' gay agenda vs the Right Wing's anti-gay agenda
More on the background to the Right Wing accusing cartoon characters as having a "gay agenda" according to this Advocate story:
When Focus on the Family founder James Dobson raised a ruckus in January about SpongeBob SquarePants’s appearance in what he dubbed a “pro-homosexual video” designed to promote diversity to schoolchildren, it was so widely (and erroneously) assumed that Dobson had said SpongeBob himself was gay that the cartoon hero’s creator, Stephen Hillenburg, felt compelled to explain to the press that the character was, in fact, “asexual.”
...“What kind of message does this send to my children and to all the children that they go to school with?” demands Pike [who with her partner, Gillian Pieper, raises three children in Vermont]. “That we don’t [exist], so you can bully [my kids], so you can call them ‘faggot’? We seem to be the lost segment, the last minority that the government is actually saying it’s OK to discriminate against. That’s remarkable to me.” Wilson, it should be noted, regrets that the couple “through no fault of their own” found themselves “left in the lurch because of this.” He adds, “For that, I’m sorry.”
...Last year Pike, Pieper, and their three children, Emma, David, and James, were filmed for the “Sugartime!” episode of WGBH’s Postcards From Buster, a series designed to showcase the broad spectrum of different families in the United States.
...Pieper, for her part, takes her cue from SpongeBob creator Hillenburg, explaining that while gay people are by definition a sexual minority, “the fact is that families are not sexual, and they shouldn’t be. That’s the thing that bothered me the most about [critics who say] we sexualize children at such a young age. Well, that’s heterosexual adults who are doing that to children in mainstream media. This episode is no more sexualized than the rest of the [series]. I don’t want to see what’s sexual about the Muslim family or the family that’s living in a trailer any more than I would want anybody to see that about my life. If we can separate sexual behavior from the identity of the people who are in gay families, I think we’d be a lot better off.”