SpongeBob, Barney promote 'gay tolerance (FedEx to Sponsor in Gov't Schools)

WorldNetDaily ^ | January 6, 2005

[NYer]

In a new video to be distributed to 61,000 schools across the nation, 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, a pro-family activist group charges.

SpongeBob Squarepants is one of the popular children's TV characters appearing in a new 'tolerance' video.

Based on the 1970s hit song "We Are Family," the video will be distributed to public and private elementary schools nationwide March 11, along with lesson plans for teachers, points out the American Family Association.

The distribution, sponsored by FedEx, will coincide with the video's broadcast March 11 on Nickelodeon, PBS, and the Disney Channel in celebration of the proposed National We Are Family Day.

AFA researcher Ed Vitagliano sees the project as an "open door" to a secondary discussion of homosexuality, noting the the foundation has a "tolerance pledge" on its website that children and others are encouraged to sign, which includes sexual orientation. [Editor's note: This story previously linked to the website of a group that has the same name but no connection to the video. WND regrets the error.]

"While we want everyone to respect other people's beliefs, we do not consider it appropriate for children's television to be used in an effort to indoctrinate children to accept homosexuality," he said.

Vitagliano says the foundation is employing a bait-and-switch approach, with popular children's figures such as Arthur, Dora the Explorer, JoJo, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Big Bird and Bob the Builder.

The objective is to get children to the foundation's website "and there they're given the full pitch about homosexuality," he said.

Video producer Christopher Cerf called the video an "unprecedented event."

"For the first time characters from all of the important kids shows came together to appear in the same video," he said in a November news release. "The producers and performers from each show embraced the spirit and message of this project."

The We Are Family Foundation was founded by singer-songwriter Nile Rodgers, who wrote the hit song recorded in 1979 by Sister Sledge.

The video was financed by a grant from the Toni Mendez Shapiro estate.

"Cooperation and unity are the most important values we can teach children," Rodgers said. "We believe that this is the essential first step to loving thy neighbor."

The We Are Family Foundation says its partners in the production are the Anti-Defamation League, Crown Theatres, Disney Channel, FedEx, Nickelodeon, HIT Entertainment, Nile Rodgers/Sony Publishing/The Bernard Edwards Estate/Warner Chapel, Nelvana, PBS, Scholastic, Sesame Workshop, Toni Mendez Shapiro Estate, and WGBH-TV in Boston.

A Federal Express spokesman said the company is "proud" to provide shipping for the project.

"Promoting diversity is part of our corporate culture at FedEx," said William G. Margaritis, senior vice president, worldwide corporate communications.

Characters appearing in the video are from award-winning shows including "Arthur," "Barney," "Bear in the Big Blue House," "Between the Lions," "Blue's Clues, Bob the Builder," "The Book of Pooh," "Clifford the Big Red Dog," "Dora the Explorer," "Jimmy Neutron," "JoJo's Circus," "Kim Possible," "Lilo & Stitch: The Series," "Little Mermaid," "Madeline," "The Magic School Bus," "The Muppet Show," "The Proud Family," "Rugrats," "Sesame Street," "SpongeBob SquarePants," and "Zoom."

The video also features cameo appearances by entertainers Bill Cosby, Diana Ross and Whoopi Goldberg.

[RockAgainsttheLeft04]

It's not "revisionist" history.

Do you deny that Fallwell made the post-9/11 comments I attributed to him? (go ahead and do it, because I can back it up)

Do you deny his involvement in the ugly censorship case against Hustler magazine in the 1980's, which led to his defeat in the SCOTUS and the upholding of the right to parody as a form of freedom of speech?

And is it any better for a man like Fallwell to co-opt a children's character for his own purposes (anti-gay agenda) than it is for GLAAD and the like to co-opt said character to further their own political agenda (namely, gay rights propoganda)?

Fallwell is a clown, pure and simple, and it seems that you've bought his lampshade-over-the-head act. Too bad that we've come to such an impasse, weegee. I do enjoy your rock and roll articles.

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Okay, I finally got around to this thread again.

Why not make the pledge more honest. Have the kids pledge tolerance to all no matter the moral behavior, criminal status, mental health, ethical standards, psycholigical or sexual urges of all persons everywhere.

[weegee]

Yep. The Sex Positive Agenda (of which the Homosexual Agenda is the battering ram to society's laws and mores) encourages sexualizing children. Abstinence is prohibited because it is the "denial" of sexual desires. Free love ain't free and everyone has the right to say NO.

Kids First Book About Sex (by Joani Blank

This is the only book I reviewed that mentioned nothing about pregnancy (there is a brief mention of fertilization). Instead, it's all about being familiar with your body (there are several drawing exercises, and a workbook is available to purchase separately), good kinds of touching, masturbation, and in general helping the child to decide for him or herself what "sexy" means. There's also some brief discussion about partnerships (heterosexual or homosexual). The drawings are simple lines, and there's very little clinical language. This is a great book for open-minded, sex-positive families to share.

This is a WONDERFUL book if you care about raising children that understand their bodies and aren't afraid of sexuality. I buy it for all of my friends who have young children. It doesn't explain where babies come from, except to say that sex can lead to babies if you want it to. It celebrates the body; the entire body.

This is a book about sex. That much should be quite obvious from the title, but some people think "sex" + "kids" = "manufacture of babies", which is wrong on its face. Furthermore, this is the only children's book I've seen that gives a reasonable explaination of what sexual behavior is and how it happens. If you're ready to deal with your young child's questions and this book now, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble with your preteen down the road.

This is an "anything goes" book for youngsters. It asks kids if and how they self stimulate but has a strangely coy attitude to nudity.

I would like to see a b ook like this in the school system but I realize that is probably a way off in the future. I try to share my copies with my grandchildren and their friends by leaving it laying around for them to find.

Playbook for Kids About Sex (by Joani Blank, Marcia Quackenbush)

I'm not sure if the previous reviewers are parents of young childen, but I must say there is absolutely no chance that I will show my 8 year old this book. I must agree that this book does present sex in a very liberating way, but these are not the values I want my children to have. I encourage my daughter to ask questions about her body, sex and sexuality, and I have been more than open and honest about the entire subject. This book just goes too far for this age group. For example, I don't think a 6-9 year old needs to know what 'coming' is, or needs to fantasize about who they want to have sex with when they are adults.

The content of the book specifically does not talk much about how babies are made or born, but rather about other aspects of sexuality, specifically how the reader feels about themself. The reader might want to just read the book, or fill it in and keep it secret, or show someone what they have done.

The children of the world are the ones who will actualize this birthright to a Natural sensuality in their own lives, within their own experiences as children now, and as adults in the near future. The Playbook is an aid, a guide, a friend who will help bring about a world in which it will be unknown, weird - pathological! - to deprive any person of their enjoynment of sexual pleasure, or to exploit another's needs and desires, or worse, to sexually impose one's self on another being.

[weegee]

I refer to the Tinky Winky charge that you alledge Jerry Fallwell created. That story first circulated in the press in 1997 and Jerry Fallwell did not pick it up until 1999.

[RockAgainsttheLeft04]

I didn't say that he created it. I said he was an idiot for picking up on what was essentially a non-issue and aggravating it to national proportions (shades of Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown in the lunacy Department).

It was stupid and wrong of a few "militant" gays to use a children's show character to advance their own agenda (because said character was purple and carried a handbag) and it was equally wrong for Jerry Fallwell to use the same character (once he picked up the story) to advance his own media war against homosexuality on TV (and gays in general, I guess).

BTW: Tinky Winky wasn't gay, just a cooing "baby" on the Teletubbies show. Did Fallwell or GLAAD even bother to hear that before they made hay over the show?

[weegee]

The media conveniently ignored that they had reported the very same story 2 years before Fallwell picked it up.

Don't blame the messenger.

[nicmarlo]

FYI, Jerry Falwell DID NOT write the article in question. Additionally, as a preacher, Jerry Falwell has the right to communicate with and exhort those within his organization as he sees fit, so long as he is not abusing his First Amendment rights (inciting violence, etc.). He doesn't proclaim to be God or the President.

And may I remind you, rock, for a plane to fly, it needs both a left wing and a right wing. It's what keeps the rest of the plane centered.

The Cartoon Closet Jerry Falwell doesn't know the half of it.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Sunday, Feb. 21, 1999, at 12:30 AM PT

Tinky Winky
The reaction to the Rev. Jerry Falwell's outing of Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby, was widespread scorn and hilarity. Comedians and column writers mercilessly ridiculed Falwell for his paranoia in seeing gays under the crib.

Three comments in defense of Falwell: First, he didn't write the article in question, which appeared unsigned in National Liberty Journal, a magazine he publishes. When asked about the charge, Falwell said he had never seen Teletubbies and didn't know whether Tinky Winky was homosexual or not. The notion of Falwell attacking a cartoon character is too appealing to liberal prejudices to be easily abandoned.

Second, if you've ever watched Teletubbies, you might well suspect some kind of subliminal messaging. The four tubbies have aerials coming out of their spacesuit hoods, which receive programming that's broadcast on TV screens in their tummies. As they prance out of their bunker and around the strange, apocalyptic landscape where they live, periscope speakers pop out of the ground and feed them orders. It's both cute and creepy.

Third, the folks at Liberty College apparently got their idea about Tinky Winky not from watching the program but from reading such publications as the Washington Post and People. On Jan. 1, the Post included "TINKY WINKY, THE GAY TELETUBBY" in its annual list of what's "in" for the New Year. No one got excited. The press, including the Post, then mocked Falwell as a reactionary hick obsessed with the sexuality of puppets. Seems like a bit of a trap.

Is Tinky Winky gay? He is not the first cartoon character to be outed. More often than not it is homosexuals who claim a character as one of their own--which also puts the Falwell fuss in perspective. At the level of the creators' stated intentions, the Teletubbies have no sexual orientation....

[RockAgainsttheLeft04]

First off, I never said Falwell wrote the article in question, nor did I say that Falwell himself invented the "Tinky Winky was gay" hubbub. What I said was that Fallwell aggravated an already lousy situation, and that it was equally wrong for him to drag his biases into the children's programming as it was for the gay rights groups (or gay-friendly writers in the Washington Post).

I never said that Falwell thought himself to be either God or the President, but rather that I think him a fool, an extremist, and a proponent of government censorship over media (the Hustler thing).

And You're right; a plane needs both a left and a right wing to fly. I usually take my place on the right side of the plane (80% of the time), But both wings are equally off-base whenever homosexuality is addressed (Really people, IT'S NOT A POLITICAL ISSUE!)

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

An abbreviated pledge for the kiddies:

We pledge to never judge people by the color of their skin or the content of their character.

[nicmarlo]

Thought these articles may be of interest:

1. FALLACIES OF NONDIRECTIVE EDUCATION: Dr. William R. Coulson, Guest and Contributing Psychologist to Culture Shock

In schools across America, time is taken from academics to provide children with drug education, suicide education, and sex education courses; the promise is to reduce or eliminate personal experimentation with drugs, sex and suicide. That promise is false. Follow up research shows increased drug use and sexual activity after the typical classroom exercises; and from the popular "death and dying courses," there are preliminary indications that this kind of education also leads to a greater likelihood of violence against the self. The education is called "nondirective" or "affective." Teachers are instructed to withdraw to the position of "facilitator," offering students "reflective listening" and nonjudgmental acceptance instead of confident instruction. Gradually the most undisciplined children begin to take over: parked in what one commercial curriculum purveyor proudly calls "conversation circles" (a kind of enforced friendship), the experimenters among the student body begin to teach the inexperienced how to become more experimental. It's like persuading the class there's no need to take the problems of drugs, violence and premarital sex very seriously: what's needed instead is principally to uncover feelings-this instead of being instructed.

W. R. Coulson was one of the initiators of the 1960s-styled contemporary movement away from classroom academics. But he long ago turned away and recanted....

2. Experiments in Moral Education, by William Kilpatrick, Boston College

* * *

Where did this experimental approach come from?

The most important thing to know about the origin of the decision-making approach, is to understand that it's essentially a transplant from the world of therapy. It was an attempt to take ideas and techniques that had proved useful in counseling and to put them to work in the classroom. In the 1940's and 50's Carl Rogers and others had pioneered a method of counseling that was non-directive, non-judgmental, and client-centered. Have you heard this name, Carl Rogers? Along with Abraham Maslow, he was one of the founding fathers of what became known as humanistic psychology or human potential psychology. Rogers is not the best known of psychologists but I don't think any other psychologist has had as much influence on our culture and ways of thinking. In the 60's and 70's these counseling techniques which Rogers had developed were introduced into schools with the result that teachers began to take a non-directive, non-judgmental attitude toward values. Each person would have to discover his own values, and no one could say that one value was superior to another.

The emphasis- As it was in the therapy - was on feeling good about yourself and feeling comfortable with your choices. It was an approach which cast the teacher in the role of amateur psychologist and which turned the values education classroom into something resembling an encounter group.

It is interesting to note, by the way, that Carl Rogers did not use this non-directive approach with his own children or grandchildren. Dr. William Coulson, who knew Rogers well, tells the story of visiting the Rogers household one hot summer day when the family was gathered around the outdoor swimming pool. It was as inground pool with a concrete border, and two of Rogers' granddaughters were there. One of these girls took a coke bottle and made as though she was going to throw it against the side of the pool (This was in the days when coke bottles were made of glass - I'm sure none of you can remember that far back).

Well Dr. Coulson is sitting in his lounge chair, observing all this, and thinking to himself "Hmm, I wonder how Rogers is going to handle this in a non-directive way? Is he going to say 'Un-huh, un-huh, I guess you're wondering, 'Gee! What would it be like to throw the bottle"? But that's not what Rogers said. What he actually said was "Put that down! That's dangerous! Someone could get hurt!" So much for the non-directive approach when it comes to your own grandchildren......

* * *

Americans failed experiments in moral education - values clarification, decision-making, moral reasoning - are examples of individualism taken to the extreme. In these approaches each individual child is encouraged to make up his own values with very little guidance from adult society.

We thought that if parents and teachers refrained from teaching values, youngsters would be free to think for themselves. But that is not what happened. Instead youngsters were left to the mercy of the peer group and the media. And, of course, the Media had no hesitation about imposing its own values on children....

[garbanzo]

As a rule, I don't find it interesting talking to conspiracy freaks and I'm not in the poke-the-conspiracy-nut kind of mood today either. I can leave it at this though - I hope you find your reality enjoyable.

[garbanzo]

But both wings are equally off-base whenever homosexuality is addressed (Really people, IT'S NOT A POLITICAL ISSUE!)

HERETIC! Don't you know that there are COMMUNISTS HOMOSEXUALS lurking in every shadow just waiting for the chance to do America in?!

[RockAgainsttheLeft04]

I'm not lying garbanzo; Your post made me LOL.

I've been burned at the stake so many times by unstable gay-fixated fundamentalists on these particular threads that I've switched my undies preference from satin to asbestos.

Good day to 'ya, and good FReeping!

[nicmarlo]

Then, apparently, it is your opinion that a "wrong" is committed when: after reading literature on a subject, someone issues their concerns to others that an innocent child's exposure to possible immoral or unnatural behaviors, via a Trojan Horse, may be--one of many--"change agents" leading to acceptance of those immoral or unnatural behaviors?

And it is equally "wrong" to voice a belief that, through those deceitful means, an immoral agenda is being, or may be, propagated against innocent children? This after it is known that children are and have been targets of influence by the media (for various reasons) and the educational system, for decades.

Surely, you jest that Jerry Falwell is aggravating any "situation" by expressing to his congregation his concerns on children's programming. The situation was CREATED because Falwell dared to allow what printed to print. BTW, over the years, I have also expressed my concerns about various children's programs, to lots of people.

As I earlier posted, however, Jerry Falwell did not write the article and never watched the programs in question. That he "allowed" the article to be printed does not make what he did "wrong."

Do I agree with or follow Jerry Falwell? No. Does he have strong beliefs. Sounds like it. Do you? Sure sounds like it. Do I agree with you? Apparently not. I bet my strong beliefs, your strong beliefs, and his don't coincide at all. But that's not a qualifier for "fool." Just a disagreement, maybe quite a few.

An extremist: of course, that's a subjective term. In this instance, it's also a pejorative term. By what standard are you comparing "extreme?" (Just want to know....because, by someone else's standard, Falwell might be extreme left on certain issues and moderate on others---which extremes, BTW, are we discussing?)

As far as his being a proponent of censorship, this make him a bad person because he wants pornographic material to stop flowing so freely? I don't think so. And there's lot of other people, even those who aren't religious leaders, who believe it is wrong to have internet pornography, and various other sundries, falling into the hands of children (and others)....especially on the internet at school libraries.

[nicmarlo]

garbanzo, as I stated earlier, you proven already that you aren't interested in the truth. You are willfully ignorant. So, I'll already stopped casting the pearls before swine.

[RockAgainsttheLeft04]

Once again, nic, you've wasted a WHOLE heap of time ans space without presenting a single fact to back up your argument. The last post consisted mostly of your personal moral opinion (which I couldn't give a damn less about) and your defense of Jerry Falwell.
Trojan horse? How about Tin-foil?

By "extremist" I mean to say that Falwell is a consistent supporter of strict, suffocating government controls over private media and entertainment, culminating with his attempts to hold Larry Flynt legally liable for his comic parody of Falwell, an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment. Falwell's subversive attempts to override the First Amendment out of personal offense and spite are nothing short of extreme, as are his comments suggesting that America somehow brought the attacks of Sept. 11 upon itself through it's "moral decay" ( making him the Susan Sontag of the right as far as I'm concerned)


You said, "As far as his being a proponent of censorship, this make him a bad person because he wants pornographic material to stop flowing so freely?"

Well, in a word, yes. Once again, it's not his place to legislate (or influence legislation on) his personal or religious sexual prejudices on others. He could condemn porn till my ears bleed and I wouldn't care; it's his First Amendment right to. But to actually interfere with the flow of such material to paying adults seeking it is beyond the pale, and none of his f****** business (scuze my French, but you've got my blood boiling here).

[RockAgainsttheLeft04]

RE: "garbanzo, as I stated earlier, you proven already that you aren't interested in the truth. You are willfully ignorant. So, I'll already stopped casting the pearls before swine."


Now, now-- play nice. Calling garbanzo "willfully ignorant" for refusing to accept at face value the bedroom-invading, quasi-authoritarian propoganda you've been spewing on this thread is hardly a good call.

[unbalanced but fair]

Even though you didn't reply to my post directly, I believe you have done so through your other posts. Don't bother to reply to this one now either. But I would like to quote you if I may...post 260: "I don't make judgements on people based simply on what they believe in or do." I wonder.

[nicmarlo]

Now, now-- play nice. Calling garbanzo "willfully ignorant" for refusing to accept at face value the bedroom-invading, quasi-authoritarian propoganda you've been spewing on this thread is hardly a good call.

Uh, no. Calling a spade a spade is the way it is. He makes sarcastic retorts to facts, spewing his opinions, backing them up with more opinions. That is called willfull ignorance.

[Cogadh na Siths Girl]

Confronting that desire and moving BEYOND it is what should be done

i don't disagree, but there are tons of people out there who do. And while i don't support it being brought into schools, or forced into the public eye, what two consenting adults do behind a closed door(which, gay or straight is where it should be kept), well, that's just none of my business.