Buster

The intolerance towards lesbians in the Buster controversy is sillier and more extreme than I realized. From the NY Times:

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings denounced the program, starring Buster Baxter, a cute animated rabbit who until now has been known primarily as a close friend of Arthur, the world's most famous aardvark. Ms. Spellings said many parents would not want children exposed to a lesbian life style.
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"Postcards From Buster" is a spinoff of "Arthur" that combines live action and animation and went on the air a year ago. In the series, aimed at young elementary schoolchildren, Buster travels to 24 different states with his father and sends video postcards home.

Buster appears briefly onscreen, but mainly narrates these live-action segments, which show real children and how they live. One episode featured a family with five children, living in a trailer in Virginia, all sharing one room. In another, Buster visits a Mormon family in Utah. He has dropped in on fundamentalist Christians and Muslims as well as American Indians and Hmong. He has shown the lives of children who have only one parent, and those who live with grandparents.
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"What we are trying to do in the series is connect kids with other kids by reflecting their lives. In some episodes, as in the Vermont one, we are validating children who are seldom validated. We believe that 'Postcards From Buster' does this in a very natural way - and, as always, from the point of view of children."

(Emphasis added.) If you want your children believing other children are all just like them, don't let them watch. Heck, if you want a good opportunity to show your children horrible, evil lesbians unfit to raise children, watch the show with them. Yes, this show is liberal. It is everything that is right with liberalism.

This is why I get so frustrated with the Christian right. Please, just stop forcing your unthinking, black & white morals on the rest of us; we have lives to live in the real world and would like to raise our children in a way that prepares them for that world.

There are those that think "moderate" is a passive thing, something that implies you just haven't made up your mind. I believe moderation is an active choice. To be snarky about it, I'm a moderate because I believe red necks deserver tolerance, too. But BS like this makes it really hard to keep my moderate stance. I don't want to live in the world these guys in power are trying to create.

UPDATE: The Moderate Republican, who calls himself a "Sesame Street Republican" agrees with me, although he says "PBS wants to teach kids about the diverse world they live in. That is not left or right, that is what it is." Actually, this is liberalism, it's just everything that's correct about liberalism, not the boogy-man version the right caricatures and the left sometimes lives down to.