Bigots and Bullies

Hi, remember me? I used to blog here. I've been away for, well, let's just say it's been a while. So what issue is so compelling, so important, that I would once again take up the keyboard? Buster Bunny, that's what.

For the over-5 set, who may not know who Buster Bunny is or why he's important enough to talk about, let me fill you in. Buster is a rabbit (that much you may have guessed), who's best friends with Arthur, an aardvark who has his own t.v. show on PBS. Big with the kids. Anyway, Buster got a spin-off show, called Postcards from Buster. The premise was that Buster travels around the country meeting real-life kids, and then sharing their stories on t.v. in a combination of live-action and animation. Quite charming, actually.

But then Buster went to Vermont, for a show about making maple syrup. Let me tell you, from first-hand experience, this is Currier-and-Ives stuff, the essence of Americana -- crisp mountains in spring, sap running into buckets, horse-drawn sleighs collecting the bucket loads, the sugar houses on century-old farms, yada yada yada. Except that Buster featured children who are being raised by two lesbians. And so, of course, conservatives and their Republican lackeys went ballistic. The Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, wrote to the President of PBS, and the episode was pulled, toot sweet.

So far, this is old news (the events in question took place in January 2005). But let us not pass over this without quickly recalling Secretary Spellings' bigoted comments: "Many parents", she wrote, "would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode." Note, by the way, that the words "deviant" and "twisted" are omitted from the Secretary's statement, but, I believe, can be fairly inferred from the context.

As an aside, I'd prefer if my young children weren't exposed to the lifestyles of the homeless men we pass each day on our way to the subway. But I don't see the Secretary of Education rallying the conservative faithful to eradicate the scourge of homelessness. I'm left to my own wits to explain to a five-year-old why a grown man is asking him, a kid, for spare change -- and what he can do to really help. See, it turns out, Madame Secretary, that the world isn't always pretty, and part of my job as a parent is to help my kids make sense of that, instead of hiding unpleasant things away and making believe that everything is fine. It's what I signed up for. End of aside.

But here's the part that compelled me to post: after the broo-ha-ha over Buster's visit to Vermont, underwriting support for the entire show dried up. Such is the strangle hold that conservatives have over government and business. But that's not the worst part, to my mind. See, according to a story in today's New York Times [link], it turns out that show had received $5 million from the -- wait for it -- Department of Education, as part of "Ready to Learn" grant program, which calls for programming to "promote cultural diversity". So what did the DoE do to back up the bigotry of the Secretary? Give yourself a point if you said they rewrote the Ready to Learn grant to eliminate the call for cultural diversity. That's right -- in an effort to ensure that our kids don't discover about that girls sometimes do dirty things to girls instead of to boys as god intended (because really, isn't that what the conservatives here are really worried about?), we have eliminated an incentive and a means to teach kids to be tolerant of, and learn from, people who aren't like them.

Which, by the way, is something that kids do innately. It's the intolerance that has to be taught.