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.
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.
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