The Kids Are Alright
From Queerday comes this terrific story about middle school students rallying in support of Sponge Bob.
Students at a suburban New York City middle school have come to SpongeBob’s defense. About a half-dozen students at James A. Farley Middle School in Stony Point donned SpongeBob SquarePants clothing Friday to support the cartoon character’s right to be himself.
Earlier this month Christian fundamentalists declared that a pro-tolerance music video featuring SpongeBob and aimed at school kids has a gay subtext. The video will be sent to 61,000 elementary schools in March.
…Friday’s demonstration at Farley Middle School was organized by seventh-grade class president Jordan Uffer.
The students wore a variety of clothing bearing depictions of SpongeBob.
“He’s a cartoon,” the 12-year-old Uffer told the Journal News. “I felt there was no reason for them to say that he was homosexual, and there isn’t a real difference between gay people and not-gay people. We’re all human beings.”
It’s stories like this that make me a little more hopeful for the future, as upcoming generations seem to be rejecting the bigotry of the parents and grandparents. Maybe all we have to do is wait for a couple more generations of the intellectual and moral “dinosaurs” we’re stuck with now to die off.
January 31st, 2005 at 12:23 pm
One can hope. But it seems like conservative ideals are making a resurgence in many ways. You would think that with the advances made in gay rights that the backlash we saw against gay marriage wouldn’t happen. Maybe waiting for the dinosaur to die might be unwise–cause in the meanwhile, they’ll stomp our houses down and our crops, and we’ll have no place to sleep or food to eat. And then we’ll be the dinosaur.
Bernard Bradshaw
Sex and the Second City.com