Posted on 01/22/2005 10:37:46 AM PST by Pikamax
People who read the Times account weren't very happy with Dobson. Over dinner, for instance, my sister laid it on the table with the off-hand remark, "I see that now they're attacking SpongeBob for being gay." "They" are not one of her favorite groups. Nor one of mine.On the heels of electoral victories to bar same-sex marriage, some influential conservative Christian groups are turning their attention to a new target: SpongeBob SquarePants.
"Does anybody here know SpongeBob?" James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, asked the guests Tuesday night at a black-tie dinner for members of Congress and political allies to celebrate the election results.
In many circles, SpongeBob needs no introduction. He is popular among children and grownups as well who watch him cavorting under the sea on the Nickelodeon cartoon program that bears his name. In addition, he has become a camp figure among adult gay men, perhaps because he holds hands with his animated sidekick Patrick.
Now, Dobson said, SpongeBob's creators had enlisted him in a "pro-homosexual video," in which he appeared alongside other children's television characters such as Barney and Jimmy Neutron, among many others.
Christian Conservative groups have issued a gay alert warning over a children's video starring SpongeBob SquarePants, Barney and a host of other cartoon favorites.
The wacky square yellow SpongeBob is one of the stars of a music video due to be sent to 61,000 U.S. schools in March. The makers -- the nonprofit We Are Family Foundation -- say the video is designed to encourage tolerance and diversity.
But at least two Christian activist groups say the innocent cartoon characters are being exploited to promote the acceptance of homosexuality.
I do not know why you cannot find the curriculum information on their website. I found it easily.
Thanks for the ping and thanks for your post. I agree with it totally. The single minded, myopic zealots are seriously misguided and need to have some common sense talked into them.
RE: "I just read your profile. . I'd go back and do some heavy editing before you become too condescending."
I will be the first to admit when I have done wrong, and I am admitting it now. I have harsh words against Muslims on my homepage, which I wrote in an angry huff after witnessing one too many acts of Muslim extremist terrorism on the nightly news. It was wrong of me to slander all Muslims as violent terrorists when there are such a thing as peaceful, non-violent Muslims if you look foir them. They just don't make the press like the anti-Semetic Wahabbist murderers do (much like how another posters bias against gays seems to be based on the violent molestations of a few).
I will not be a hypocrite here, but I also won't change my homepage either. I don't want to hide from my mistakes covering them up. That's how I felt when I first joined FR, wrong as it was, but it's not really me. I don't hate all Muslims, but I do hate those who murder innocent men, women, and children; Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists and Agnostics, and other Muslims because they think that their god gave them the right to.
RE: "If you would like to post some research disproving the above, that would be great."
Nice dodge, buddy, but you're not going to wag the dog with me. It is you who is making the wild accusations here (slandering all gays as evil, immoral, child molestors) and it is up to you alone to provide the BURDEN OF PROOF. So maybe you'd like to provide some evidence, untained by religious or partisan propoganda, to support your slander of the homosexual community in America-- medical or professional research studies and the like. You know, something that wasn't written by a zealot like Dr. Dobsen or Falwell, etc., people who make their careers by twisting the facts to fit their preconcieved religious and moral notions whatever they do.
Catch you later, boyo.
If you refuse to educate yourself because of pre-conceived notions, there's nothing I nor anyone else can do or say that will cause light to enter your mind.
But just in case you have some desire to further educate yourself, here are a couple of excerts, and links, and I enoucarge you to go to the links, since more info is available there:
(BTW, in case you don't know, Tammy Bruce is a homosexual herself, and admits that the "gay" community is indeed after children, and to her credit, speaks out against it.)
Sorry the formatting isn't so great, but if you go to the links there are links within links. IOW, plenty of information and none of it, to my knowledge, is authored by either Dobson or Falwell.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1291742/posts?page=50
In her book The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values, Tammy Bruce wrote in Chapter Four, First the Culture, Then the Children: The Agenda of the Radical Gay Elite:
"I believe this grab for children by the sexually confused adults of the Gay Elite repesents the most serious problem facing our culture today." (Pg.94)
An excerpt from "Tammy Bruce: Protect New York's Children from the Gay Elite"
"In my book The Death of Right and Wrong I warn about the sexualization and targeting of children by the radical gay fringe...
... As I outline in detail in DRW, there is a sick movement among the homosexual academics and the radical gay fringe to change the age of sexual consent in this nation to 12-years-old. As sexually transmitted diseases for both hetero- and homosexuals increases and HIV/AIDS runs rampant, the goal by some to have access to children (untouched virgins, free of disease) has increased...
Think about it: we’re talking about children who are not psychologically mature enough to decide what to have for dinner, let along comprehend the intricacies of sexuality and all its physical and psychological repercussions. But the Gay Elite want us to believe that somehow these children know they prefer to have anal sex or need their breasts removed to find their “true” selves. Yeah, and I’m Anna Nicole Smith.
I cannot even begin to express my rage at a radical gay fringe and leftists who now are openly and willingly sacrificing children in a vain and self-obsessed drive to quench their own appetites for the young. That’s all this amounts to—adults indulging themselves, and others made too mute by political correctness to step up and say "No..."
An excerpt from "Targeting Children - Part four: Access to children: homosexuality and molestation"
"Homosexuality and pedophila"
It should be said from the outset that a homosexual orientation does not automatically lead to pedophilia, and most homosexuals do not abuse children. Moreover, most homosexual activist groups publicly denounce pedophilia.
But that is not the end of the story. Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover says in his book Homosexuality and the Politicis of Truth that there is a "substantial, influential, and growing segment of the homosexual community that neither hides nor condemns pedophilia."
One reason for this may be that the homosexual movement is based on the rather simple ethic of individual sexual freedom. In the activist magazine Gayme, writer Bill Andriette said, "The only standard for moral sex… is that it be freely and equally consented to by the persons involved."
From that sexual ethic to one which includes intergenerational sex is but a short leap. Andriette said, "There is no question that blacks, whites, women, men, children, and adolescents can consent to sex … . If we want really to respect the authenticity of individuals we have to let people take risks, explore different values, and recognize that we will be challenged and threatened by what they discover." (Emphasis added.)
This homosexual perspective was in full view nearly three decades ago, with the release of the 1972 Gay Rights Platform. Activists in Chicago, representing the fledgling homosexual movement, demanded the "[r]epeal of all state laws prohibiting private sexual acts involving consenting persons," and the "[r]epeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent."
Such homosexuals see society’s disapproval of adult-child sex as the transgression, rather than the adult-child sex itself. In The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power and Consent, lesbian author Pat Califia said, "Boy lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers … are not child molesters. The child abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and parents who force their staid morality onto the young people in their custody."
Moreover, for many homosexuals, this same-sex attraction to minors may stem from their own sexual experiences. Research shows that very often homosexuals had their own initial same-sex encounter with an adult while children. (See AFA Journal, May 1999.)
Writing in The Advocate, a magazine for homosexuals, Carl Maves agreed. "How many gay men, I wonder, would have missed out on a valuable, liberating experience – one that initiated them into their sexuality – if it weren’t for so-called molestation?" he said..."
... Furthermore, some suggest that public disavowal of NAMBLA by homosexual groups is a smokescreen. David Thorstad, a founding member of NAMBLA and former president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance, says homosexual activists have supressed pedophilia in order "to sanitize the image of homosexuality to facilitate its entrance into the social mainstream..."
( more info here )
An excerpt from ""Pedophilia Chic" Reconsidered (The taboo against sex with children continues to erode)"
"This social consensus against the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents, however—unlike those against, say, animal sex or incest—is apparently eroding, and this regardless of the fact that the vast majority of citizens do overwhelmingly abominate the thing. For elsewhere in the public square, the defense of adult-child sex—more accurately, man-boy sex—is now out in the open. Moreover, it is on parade in a number of places—therapeutic, literary, and academic circles; mainstream publishing houses and journals and magazines and bookstores—where the mere appearance of such ideas would until recently have been not only unthinkable, but in many cases, subject to prosecution.
Dramatic though this turnaround may be, it did not happen overnight. Four years ago in these pages, in an essay called "Pedophilia Chic," I described in some detail a number of then-recent public challenges to this particular taboo, all of them apparently isolated from one another.1 Plainly, as the record even then showed, a surprising number of voices were willing to rise up on behalf of what advocates refer to as "man-boy love," or what most people call sexual abuse...
Four-plus years and many other challenges to the same taboo later, it is clear that this hypothesis got something wrong. For one thing, no sustained public challenges have arisen over other primal taboos. Even more telling, if nihilism and nihilism alone were the explanation for public attempts to legitimize sex with boy children, then we would expect the appearance of related attempts to legitimize sex with girl children; and these we manifestly do not see.2 Nobody, but nobody, has been allowed to make the case for girl pedophilia with the backing of any reputable institution. Publishing houses are not putting out acclaimed anthologies and works of fiction that include excerpts of men having sex with young girls. Psychologists and psychiatrists are not competing with each other to publish studies demonstrating that the sexual abuse of girls is inconsequential; or, indeed, that it ought not even be defined as "abuse."
Two examples from the last few weeks will suffice to show the double standard here. In the November 12 New York Times Book Review, a writer found it unremarkable to observe of his subject, biographer Gavin Lambert, that when "Lambert was a schoolboy of 11, a teacher initiated him [into homosexuality], and he 'felt no shame or fear, only gratitude.'" It is unimaginable that New York Times editors would allow a reviewer to describe an 11-year-old girl being sexually "initiated" by any adult (in that case, "initiation" would be called "sexual abuse"). Similarly, in mid-December the New York Times Magazine delivered a cover piece about gay teenagers in cyberspace which was so blasé about the older men who seek out boys in chat rooms that it dismissed those potential predators as mere "oldies." Again, one can only imagine the public outcry had the same magazine published a story taking the same so-what approach to online solicitation, off-line trysts, and pornography "sharing" between anonymous men and underage girls.
No: As was true four years ago, contemporary efforts to rationalize, legitimize, and justify pedophilia are about boys. Forget about abstractions like nihilism; what the record shows is something more prosaic. The reason why the public is being urged to reconsider boy pedophilia is that this "question," settled though it may be in the opinions and laws of the rest of the country, is demonstrably not yet settled within certain parts of the gay rights movement..."
An excerpt from "The Problem with Equivalence: "Pedophilia Chic" defended"
"In "'Pedophilia Chic' Reconsidered," Eberstadt raises questions about the mixed messages on appropriate sexual behavior for minors given out by the youth websites of many gay organizations. Eberstadt is concerned that these sites are encouraging young boys and girls to think sexually at ever younger ages. The parents disturbed by the Outright Vermont program agree. During the campaign, these parental groups complained loudly about graphic pictorial illustrations of, and instructions for, gay oral sex, fisting, and "rimming" ("mouth to ass," as the pamphlet describes it) made available to young people by Outright Vermont. Interestingly, supporters of Outright Vermont were, by their own account, "visibly shaken" by these attacks. What so shocked the partisans of Outright Vermont was that anyone could be horrified by the act of distributing to youngsters the sort of "safe sex" material gay organizations now ignore as commonplace.
The cultural fault line here is profound, and no aberration. The gay adults who operate gay-straight alliances and organizations like Outright Vermont seem to have a very different view than most heterosexual parents on the extent to which sexually explicit material ought to be made available to young people. And to be sure, explicit material about homosexual sex is even more disturbing to most parents than explicit material about heterosexual sex. With good reason. The most disquieting thing of all is that programs like Outright Vermont are now targeted at GLBTQ's. That's an acronym for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Questioning youth. A "questioning" youth, of course, is uncertain about his or her sexual orientation. But it's entirely commonplace for children who end up heterosexual to go through a youthful phase in which they question their own sexual orientation. Will these children now be told they have a gay gene, be handed a dental dam, and directed to an adult gay porn site? ..."
Homosexuality and Child Sexual Abuse
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS02E3
· Pedophiles are invariably males: Almost all sex crimes against children are committed by men.
· Significant numbers of victims are males: Up to one-third of all sex crimes against children are committed against boys (as opposed to girls).
· The 10 percent fallacy: Studies indicate that, contrary to the inaccurate but widely accepted claims of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, homosexuals comprise between 1 to 3 percent of the population.
· Homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses: Individuals from the 1 to 3 percent of the population that is sexually attracted to the same sex are committing up to one-third of the sex crimes against children.
· Some homosexual activists defend the historic connection between homosexuality and pedophilia: Such activists consider the defense of "boy-lovers" to be a legitimate gay rights issue.
· Pedophile themes abound in homosexual literary culture: Gay fiction as well as serious academic treatises promote "intergenerational intimacy."
Your turn. Post some research disproving the above.
We'll all be interested to see what you come up with.
Thank goodness for the moral courage of Tammy Bruce.
Thanks for the quote!
Here's a NEW update:
In addition, I find it fascinating that not only has WAFF threatened a lawsuit against AFA but has also REMOVED most of the offensive pro-gay pages from its site, especially the ones that AFA has specifically referenced (including #'s 1, 3 & 4 from my earlier post). Is this an attempt at making peace or an attempt at removing evidence?? (for more info on this see: http://www.earnedmedia.org/sbm0125.htm )
I just decided to see if whatsisname was able to find any articles in support of his POV - he hasn't yet.
;-)
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