Bert & Ernie from Sesame Street
Posted on 08/29/2011 2:41:07 PM PDT by NYer
August 29, 2011 (Breakpoint.org) - Sesame Workshop, the company that produces the kid’s show “Sesame Street,” announced last week the Bert and Ernie will not be getting married.
Bert and Ernie, two of the show’s Muppets, are best buddies. They live in the same house and sleep in the same room — in separate twin beds. They bicker, they share, they enjoy a bedtime cookie together every night.
They’re such good friends that some assume they must be gay. And one group used an online petition to ask “Sesame Street” to let the truth be known. Bert and Ernie, they say, should come out of the closet and get married. This would presumably teach tolerance and respect for differences — something, the petitioners note, “Sesame Street” has tried to do for years.
But “Sesame Street” has made it clear that Bert and Ernie are puppets and as such, “Do not have a sexual orientation.” Good point: but that’s not the only reason that their getting married was a bad idea.
Writing in US News & World Report, Peter Roff notes that there are things little children do not need to know. “[S]ome stages of life,” he writes, “for example, the years from 2 to 4 [Sesame Street’s demographic] — must be walled off from the passions of adults.”
And blogger Alyssa Rosenberg summed up the biggest objection. “I think it’s actively unhelpful to gay and straight men alike,” she said, “to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple ... Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way.”
Strange indeed. It teaches the ridiculous and deeply destructive idea that same-sex friendships are necessarily sexual. And that’s the last thing we want to teach our children, because it will spell the end of friendship, particularly friendships between young men.
Yet that is precisely the message that’s communicated over and over. It’s the reason gay apologists want to eroticize Bert and Ernie, David and Jonathan, Jesus and the apostle John, and Achilles and Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad.
Some in our culture are apparently incapable of understanding close friendship without sex. And that flies right in the face of a Christian understanding of friendship.
“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship,” wrote the great thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas.
As Christian brothers and sisters we are called to deep friendships with one another. And while we may be more comfortable with the word “fellowship” than “friendship,” Christian relationships marked by love, honesty, selflessness, intensity, and a chaste brotherly or sisterly passion for one another are a powerful witness to the love of God in our largely friendless world.
Bert and Ernie, in spite of differences in personality and temperament — and without any sexual overtones — are the very best of friends. And our kids need that kind of example. They need it from television, parents, and especially the Church in order to see through the hyper-sexualized fog that’s all around them.
Ping!
“to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple ... Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way.”
Exactly. I’ve noticed the effects that gay activism has had on my generation, and generally its made straight men paranoid of anything being remotely considered “gay”. The kind of close friendships seen between male friends in previous generations are now all viewed as suspicious and unmanly, and I don’t think it’s done any good at all.
bromance?
...I guess letting them commit sockomy is out of the question then...
3 generations of teenagers joked that Bert and Ernie were gay. Then apparently some group of activists didn’t notice it was a joke.
Which means that the disturbing rumors about Snuffleupagus trunking Elmo and “Gonzo Does Big Bird” are just that, rumors.
Ernie already pledged to Rubber Ducky that he was “The One.”
I was with the author until “Achilles and Patroclus”.
The way you keep adding punchlines to my posts today people are gonna think we’re Bert and Ernie ;)
This makes lots more sense than J.K. Rowling’s decision to have all her male characters shag each other.
BTW: How bad did she hate them to suddenly out them for political gain?
Quite a bit to “suggest” it. Nothing that overtly states it.
It was well accepted in Homer’s time and shortly after that the two were lovers.
Alexander the Great, for example, took it as a given when he and his lover went to a shrine for the two of them.
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The same is true for females. I recall a time when girlfriends (in the true sense of that word) would walk arm in arm down the street. Today, that could be interpreted as two lesbians sharing a special moment.
I was quite shocked the other morning when a Tide commercial came on tv. The commercial portrays an ultra-feminine mother, bemoaning her daughter's aversion to pink and affinity for a favored camo-hoodie. The mom expresses her disappointment that the laundry detergent got a stain out of her daughter's tomboyish outfit (which she apparently would have preferred to toss). Here is the commercial. You be the judge. IMO, this is caving to the homosexual agenda.
The other problem with how this furthers the Left’s moral nihlism is that it repeats the lie that there is no love without sex.
This lie is what makes young people think that if they’re in “love,” they must have sex. It’s the lie that if they’re having sex, they’re in “love.”
And most importantly to the Left, this is the lie that they use to promote homosexual activity among adolescents, who should and do have strong same-sex friendships, which provide a feeling of friends that love each other.
But since the Left indoctrinates that love MUST be and ALWAYS is expressed as sex, some of these friendships become sexualized — simply because that’s what kids think you do when you have a strong feeling of love for someone.
I.e., since sex is never reserved for “the” one, that means that whenever you feel a feeling of love for someone or something, the Left says you must have sex with it.
Then once the activity is engaged or experimented with, the Left swoops in to tell kids that that definitely means they are — you guessed it, gay!
All very convenient for the Left, but a sad perversion of the normal and wonderful experience of having a best best friend in every sense of the word.
I posted on how the Left exploited and perverted the normal strong same-sex friendships most people were blessed to experience in adolescence and early adulthood — the “best friend” that often became a life-long friend.
Since the Left equates any kind of love with the requirement that it must be expressed by having sex, a whole range of normal, emotionally, psychologically and socially healthy “love” relationships become perverted or avoided.
It’s almost impossible these days for two same-sex friends to live together or take a vacation together without getting the same reaction Bert & Ernie got here.
Many social scientists who study homosexuality say that one of the core social problems of homosexual men is fear of having true nonsexual friendships with other men.
CAUTION FOR THE FAINT OF HEART: Crude language.
I think it is interesting that an entire group of people are consumed and driven to have their identities defined around what they do with their sexual organs. Doesnt that seem odd to you? Do you walk around with the thought that you want the world to see you as Hetrosexual at every given moment? Put bumper stickers on your car? Act and refer to it constantly through conversation, what you see ??? Yes you carry hetrosexuality in the back ground of your identity but not as a foreground feature like Homosexuals. Putting everything aside I just find that odd in its own right.It seems like they must have external validation by their blatant In your face sexualization of everything. As if they did not continue the external presentation of their lifestyle it will evaporate.... odd.
Sesame Street is awful any more anyway. Should be called Socialist Street. It’s the kind of painfully boring stuff a kid would have to sit through in a Head Start program. Believe it or not, kids managed to learn shapes, letters, and colors before we had all this education professor produced tedium.
Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.
huh? what did JK rowling do?
heh heh
So I suppose now they’ll want to portray “The Fellowship of the Ring” as a gay romp in the woods?
Excellent and true. It is a failing of the English language that you can ‘love’ a sandwich, ‘love’ your family, and make ‘love’ all using the same word.
In Greek you at least have eros, philia and agape.
It has dumbed down generations of Americans. Now, Mr. Rogers was a real innovator. He introduced shows that are mirrored today - How Things Work, Dirty Jobs, etc. All the while acting and speaking like an adult.
True, and an interesting observation on language.
It’s more of the practical destruction of the Left’s moral nihlism:
They destroy friendships by sexualizing them.
They destroy sex by disconnecting it from emotional intimacy.
They destroy emotional intimacy by devaluing sex and, by promiscuity of all sorts, stripping sex of its power to strengthen rather than weaken emotional bonds.
True, and an interesting observation on language.
It’s more of the practical destruction of the Left’s moral nihlism:
They destroy friendships by sexualizing them.
They destroy sex by disconnecting it from emotional intimacy.
They destroy emotional intimacy by devaluing sex and, by promiscuity of all sorts, stripping sex of its power to strengthen rather than weaken emotional bonds.
In the culture Homer wrote for, in the language he wrote in, it was almost universally accepted that the two were lovers - and it was not at all thought a strange thing - it being Greece and all.
In classic Greek culture it was even opined that “love” could only exist between two men - because women were so inferior.
Moreover Homer was not the only source - Achilles being a semi-historic mythological figure before during and after Homer wrote - other sources (a play for example) clearly showed the two were lovers.
Sources from that far back are hard to come by, being few and far between.
Do you have any sources that claim that pederasty was any less common in Greek culture during Homer’s time than 300 years after?
This is not a case of a modern reader imparting our cultural norms anachronistically to historic or semi-mythological persons - as was the case with Lincoln and the supposition that he was gay because he slept in the same bed as a man (very common) and wrote that he loved him (also very common).
As such I was, “with” the author up till his poorly chosen example.
People from the classic Greek period and after had an almost universal understanding that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers.
But maybe modern scholars can read and understand classic Greek writing and sources better than Plato.
I don't accept it, but maybe you do.
Well, They should do something about that twisted Donald Duck. He runs around in half a sailor suit with his "nephews?" There just has to be something weird going on there.
Since you asked. Someone had suggested that J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter hero characters might well be used to convey conservative ideals, loyalty, self reliance, and personal integrity.
Ms. Rowlings apparently felt that she needed to make amends to her liberal friends. She suggested that; although not mentioned in the Harry Potter Novels, she had imagined several of the wizards had been rogering each other before they suffered a severe falling out. The timing and character embellishments were such that most believed that she was betraying her characters to prevent them from being taken captive by the evil right.
So if there really was an Achilles and Patroclus, which is likely - they may or may not have actually been lovers. But it would not have been uncommon at that time or among the inheritors of their culture and language.
Homer was as far removed from the actual persons (if they were indeed actual persons) as subsequent authors were from him. He may have either played up or played down their status as lovers according to his own proclivities or the reception he wished from his audience. The end result was one that certainly suggested they were a lot closer than just ‘brothers in arms’ - without outright saying they were lovers.
Subsequent writers, like Plato, interpreted Homer's work, and possibly works that didn't survive, to mean that they were definitely lovers.
What is clear to me is that it was not our own “over-sexualized” culture that interprets Achilles and Patroclus as lovers - and as such it was a horrid example.
It may well be a case, as you suggest, that the subsequent Greek ‘over-homosexualized’ culture interpreted these two semi-historic and somewhat mythological figures to be lovers.
But it is ABSOLUTELY CLEAR from the historic record that the homo interpretation is not a modern anachronism.
So far from being a good example of our “over-sexualized” culture emphasizing homosexuality - Achilles and Patroclus are actually contrary examples.
Their possible homosexuality, which was widely accepted in ancient Greece, was absolutely downplayed in our modern mass media culture. I think they saw the ticket sales for “Alexander” and decided their course was clear! ;)
Making Bert and Ernie officially gay will ruin all the jokes about them being gay.
[ Ernie already pledged to Rubber Ducky that he was “The One.” ]
Oh great, just bring bestiality into this....
thanks. I did not know that
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