Get Over It...

SILLINESS BORDERING ON STUPIDITY DEPARTMENT

After the Supreme Court stuck down DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, a flurry of media activity mostly celebrated the end of a major law denying American same-gender couples the right to be considered by the federal government to be married even if they were legally married in their state of residence. Of course, there was  lamentation and warning by some political and religious conservatives that there would be hell to pay.  Some of the latest most blatantly absurd expressions of outrage were aimed at The New Yorker magazine which showed Sesame Street’s Ernie and Bert sitting together, leaning into each as they watched a black and white television screen with a formal picture of the justices of the Supreme Court... no captions, just the two muppets in a darkened room.

For years the Sesame Street Workshop producers have insisted that what is apparent to children and intelligent adult viewers is indeed true... Ernie and Bert are not human.  They are puppets.  Beginning as early as the 1970s, the Workshop has periodically had to defend it story line for Ernie and Bert.  Obviously, the Reverend Joseph Chambers, a Pentecostal preacher with a popular Southern radio show in the 80s and 90s, didn’t agree with Workshop officials disclaimer.  In one of his radio broadcasts he declared his objection to Ernie’s and Bert’s shared cohabitation saying it implied that homosexuality is an acceptable way of life.  He said, “Bert and Ernie are two grown men sharing a house and a bedroom.  They share clothes, eat and cook together and have blatantly effeminate characters.  In one show Bert teaches Ernie how to sew.  In another they tend plants together.  If this isn’t meant to represent a homosexual union, I can’t imagine what it’s supposed to represent.”  

Obviously, Chambers wasn’t a fan of the novelist and essayist Kurt Andersen who in 1980 in The Real Thing, a collection of mostly humorous essays, wrote, “Bert and Ernie conduct themselves in the same loving discreet way that millions of gay men, women and hand puppets do.  They do their jobs well and live a splendidly settled life together in an impeccably decorated cabinet.”  

Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell said again, “They are not gay, they are not straight, they are puppets. They don’t exist below the waist. Like all the Muppets created for Sesame Street, they were designed to educate preschoolers.  Bert and Ernie are characters who help demonstrate to children that despite their differences, they can be good friends.”

It’s high time hate-mongers among ultra-conservative religious and political groups get over it.  Freedom to marry has been declared a constitutionally established right for all citizens, for all God’s Children.  It’s now only a matter of time before same-gender marriage will be possible in all fifty states.