Nautical Nonsense
In an episode titled “Naughty Nautical Neighbors,” SpongeBob and his friend Patrick blow bubbles to each other. In each bubble, the friends have whispered a sweet message such as “you’re my best friend ever.” As the bubbles burst and SpongeBob hears Patrick’s kind comments, he blushes and giggles girlishly.
Harmless silliness…or subversive homosexuality?
A New York Times article, Conservatives Pick Soft Target, suggests that at least one person, Dr. James Dobson of the Focus on the Family, believes SpongeBob is being used to accustom children to the homosexual lifestyle.
According to his website, Dobson says he has been misunderstood and that he has no objection “to any specific cartoon characters.” Rather, “Dr. Dobson is concerned that these popular animated personalities are being exploited by an organization that’s determined to promote the acceptance of homosexuality among our nation’s youth.” As the Times article describes it, SpongeBob apears in a video an organization called the We Are Family Foundation is distributing to schools. The founder of that organization says the video promotes multiculturalism, not acceptance of homosexuality. The “tolerance” pledge which Dobson so vehemently objects to, and which does contain a reference to sexual identity, does not appear anywhere on the video, but rather on the We Are Family website.
Others in the Conservative media, however, have decided to ask the broader question, is SpongeBob Squarepants actually SpongeBob QueerPants? I went out to Krogers this evening to buy cream for coffee, and on the radio, Bill O’Reilly was asking exactly that question of his listeners. After hearing a number of dopes call in and report on the subversiveness of SpongeBob, O’Reilly concluded, “I have never watched SpongeBob, but perhaps I’ll have to keep my eye on him.” Personally, if I were SpongeBob, that statement would put the fear of God in me, considering O’Reilly’s last relationship with a loofah.
One caller to O’Reilly struck me as displaying the height of ignorance. He began by saying that he watches SpongeBob two or three times a day with his kids, and he feels that the show does have overt sexual overtones. He said he heard an explicit sexual joke while watching the program the other day. He said that in this episode he saw, SpongeBob’s “friends” were trying to get him to be more assertive. One of them is sitting on SpongeBob’s midsection, and this friend says, “I told you to be more assertive, not insertive.” This precipitated O’Reilly’s comment that he might have to keep an eye on SpongeBob.
Now it just so happens, I have a three year old who watches SpongeBob daily. I consider myself well-versed in SpongeBob lore. I, too, have seen the episode in question, and this caller to O’Reilly has it all wrong. Typically, he has skewed the scene and the joke to fit his own point of view. Let me tell you how it really happened.
In the episode in question, titled “Walking Small,” the character Plankton (who is not exactly a friend; he’s the “bad guy” of Bikini Bottom) wants to raze a beach and erect one of his Mega Chum Bucket restaurants, but he is so small he is powerless to force people off the beach. So he surreptitiously enlists SpongeBob to help him in his dastardly plot. Under the pretext of teaching SpongeBob to be more assertive, he actually teaches SpongeBob to be mean and thus chase people off the beach.
In one scene, SpongeBob and Plankton are sitting on a bench and a big fish comes along and sits on SpongeBob. Plankton tells SpongeBob to be assertive. SpongeBob sticks his finger in the fish’s pocket. Plankton yells, “Not insertive!”
Clearly, this is not a sexual reference. It’s just a classic example of a cartoon character doing something ridiculous based on something a “serious” character has said.
The calls to O’Reilly continued. I listened to six calls before I got home; only one was in defense of poor SpongeBob. However, in reality, SpongeBob doesn’t need any defense. People who find a reason to attack the harmless, silly cartoons with which we entertain our kids (and ourselves) only do damage to themselves. One might consider the case of Jerry Falwell and his attack on Tinky Winkie of the Teletubbies back in the mid-nineties. It did Falwell not a bit of good, and one could argue it only shamed him in the eyes of the “majority” he so assiduously courts.
I admit I feel foolish having to defend a cartoon character. The problem is, Dobson and O’Reilly and O’Reilly’s callers probably don’t feel one bit of shame or foolishnesss for finding the devil’s work in that pineapple under the sea. In their paranoid minds, almost the entirety of the culture is aligned against them (except for Mel Gibson), and they feel they must fight every battle, no matter how insignificant or pointless.
The SpongeBob cartoons, for those who haven’t seen them (but may feel a need to express an opinion anyway), are a throwback to the great cartoons of the past such as the Warner Brothers shorts. The setting, the plots, the characters are utterly absurd, every bit as much as a talking rabbit or pig.
To provide a couple examples, among the other undersea inhabitants, SpongeBob is good friends with a squirrel from Texas named Sandy who lives in a bubble and ventures out into Bikini Bottom wearing a deep sea diving rig. One caller to O’Reilly, apparently trying to defend SpongeBob, called her SpongeBob’s “girlfriend,” but she is not. There is nothing, nothing whatsoever of a sexual nature—neither heterosexual, homosexual, or transexual—in the SpongeBob cartoons. There is only “nautical nonsense,” as the title song says.
More absurdity: even though they all live under the sea, the fishes, sponges, starfish, and sea monsters all go to the beach to relax and, according to an episode I watched tonight (”SpongeGuard on Duty”), apparently they can even drown. Absurdity piled upon absurdity. That’s why it’s a funny, funny cartoon. Maybe some people don’t get it. As one woman said to O’Reilly tonight, she refuses to allow her children to watch it because “it makes no sense;” she thinks her children ought to live in the “real” world. One wonders if she will also forbid her children reading any fantasy or science fiction, or fiction generally that isn’t of the naturalistic school. Or maybe no one reads anymore anyway, and so it doesn’t matter.
Certainly there are some in our culture who take themselves and their “mission” all too seriously. By attacking absurdity with seriousness, the absurdity only redounds upon them.
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I started writing a reply to this post and decided I should put it on my blog instead. Thanks for reminding me how confused I am :)!
Comment by wadulisi/ melissa — Saturday, 22 January 2005 @ 4:52 am
Incidentally, as a former High School librarian, I can say with some authority that the majority of the time, this video Dobson objects to probably goes right into the trash can at the schools where it is received. I received videos like this once or twice a year, and I don’t think I ever kept one. They are useless from a pedagogic point of view. The videos are usually sent to the librarian, or they end up in the library anyway because the principal who receives it doesn’t know what to do with it, and the librarian then has to evaluate whether the video has a place in any of the school’s curricula and whether it ought to be cataloged and retained. I never kept them because there is no place for such a video. What teacher, other than a slacker who shows videos just for the hell of it, would have a place in their curriculum to show such a video? I really don’t know of a public school that has an actual course in diversity. Sometimes at the school where I worked, the week-long sex ed class would hint at the subject, but not much. The sex ed course had its own school board-approved videos anyway, and the teachers would have been scared to death to use anything else because of the threat of parent complaints or law suits.
Comment by Matthew — Saturday, 22 January 2005 @ 10:24 am
I think it is, more or less, a witch-hunt that should disrepute Dobson.
dlw
Comment by dlw — Saturday, 22 January 2005 @ 11:13 am
I agree, thus my comparison to Falwell and the teletubbies.
Comment by Matthew — Saturday, 22 January 2005 @ 11:40 am
Good post. I have a much angrier response to the Dobsonite’s attack on my blog, but I am not so much concerned with the attacks on the cartoons, but with their stated objective: attacks on the Tolerance Pledge. Where does James Dobson get off using the name of Jesus Christ to explain being offended by the request to respect people who are different then him?
Of course, I’m in complete agreement with you about the ridiculousness of the attacks on the cartoons, and I am hopeful that you’re correct that it’ll do nothing but make them look bad–but the attacks on tolerance in and of itself, those really show their true colors.
Comment by Scrivener — Sunday, 23 January 2005 @ 9:16 am
I agree. Clearly it’s tolerance itself which Dobson has a problem with. I do think it’s pointless attacks such as this that will be the undoing of the Right. It’s a kind of reckless arrogance, and it just shows to everyone in America the true goals and “values” of the Republicans they voted for.
Comment by Matthew — Sunday, 23 January 2005 @ 9:49 am
Check out Maureen Dowd’s hilarious column on Sponge Bush:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23dowd.html
Comment by Todd — Sunday, 23 January 2005 @ 10:49 pm
Thanks for pointing that out. I think Wolfie Wolfowitz is more like Squidward, though. And I’d characterize Bush as Plankton, a very small man with an enormous ego and plans for world domination. And he has a robot wife
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 24 January 2005 @ 6:54 am
I share the following thought that struck me on another thread:
“[I]n the church I run into a compulsion to order our [identities], mainly in terms of gender-sex (M-F), age (elders-youth), and family (husband-wife, parent-child). This compulsion is all about appointing authority. Looking back on my encounters with this compulsion in various fellowships, I see how people are automons about it.” (Said elsewhere.)
I invoke these words, because I think Dobson’s knee-jerk reaction, as others in the church, to be anti-tolerant is because it threatens this appointment of authority, a consuming process that dictates who is/n’t a Christian, a good Christian, “an abomination” (or “evil-doer”), not/of the world, and so on. The tolerance of the culture wars threatens this easy distribution of “who’s on top” in the version of the church food chain.
Not to say I’m a relativist (as Todd/ dhalgren rails against as well), because I’m not. But since stepping out of church and turning its patterns around in my head has given me pause: What would the church look like if it was more obsessed with loving God and loving our neighbors than with individual morality checks and playing God? (Sorry to be a bit punchy. Guess I’m tired of the preference of the church to play judge/ God.)
Comment by melissa/ wadulisi — Monday, 24 January 2005 @ 7:28 am
Thought you’d like to see this. there’a s photo at ucc.org
SpongeBob receives ‘unequivocal welcome’ from United Church of Christ
CLEVELAND — Joining the animated fray, the United Church of Christ today (Jan. 24) said that Jesus’ message of extravagant welcome extends to all, including SpongeBob Squarepants — the cartoon character that has come under fire for allegedly holding hands with a starfish.
“Absolutely, the UCC extends an unequivocal welcome to SpongeBob,” the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC’s general minister and president, said, only partly in jest. “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”
For that matter, Thomas explained, the 1.3-million-member church, if given the opportunity, would warmly receive Barney, Big Bird, Tinky-Winky, Clifford the Big Red Dog or, for that matter, any who have experienced the Christian message as a harsh word of judgment rather than Jesus’ offering of grace.
The UCC’s welcome comes in the wake of laughable accusations by James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, that the popular SpongeBob and other well-known cartoon characters are crossing “a moral line” by stressing tolerance in a national We Are Family Foundation-sponsored video that will be distributed to U.S. schools on March 11, 2005.
Later, an assistant to Dobson called SpongeBob’s participation in the video “insidious.”
Thomas said, on the contrary, it is Dobson who is crossing the moral line for sending the mistaken message that Christians do not value tolerance and diversity as important religious values.
“While Dobson’s silly accusation makes headlines, it’s also one more concrete example of how religion is misused over and over to promote intolerance over inclusion,” Thomas said. “This is why we believe it is so important that the UCC speak the Gospel in an accent not often heard in our culture, because far too many experience the cross only as judgment, never as embrace.”
Dobson, despite his often-outrageous viewpoints, is arguably one of the most oft-heard religious voices in popular culture today. Through his Focus on the Family media empire, Dobson produces daily commentaries that appear widely on television and radio stations across the United States, often times as “public service announcements.”
Meanwhile, the UCC’s recently released 30-second paid television commercial — produced to underscore the denomination’s belief that Jesus didn’t turn anyone away — has been rejected by two major television networks for being “too controversial.”
“Resistance to our message is formidable,” Thomas says, “because we’re cutting against the prevailing grain of a society that is afraid of the stranger, suspicious of difference and easily seduced by narrowly defined theological boundaries.”
The 1.3-million-member United Church of Christ, with national offices in Cleveland, has almost 6,000 local churches in the United States and Puerto Rico. It was formed by the 1957 union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.
Comment by barb — Wednesday, 26 January 2005 @ 1:10 pm
Thank you! That is so funny. Keith Olbermann over at MSNBC has a good post about the controversy, as well. He says the whole controversy stirred up by Dobson stems from paranoia that merely watching TV could make your child or yourself or “your furniture” gay. Or tolerant. Wouldn’t want to be tolerant, now would we?
Comment by Matthew — Wednesday, 26 January 2005 @ 1:14 pm
Looking at the We Are Family Foundation website you can find things such as a lessons plan for teachers, cover:
- Help students examine assumptions about the “natural order” in gender relationships.
- Write the first sentence in a description of the term “lesbian”
- Specify the characteristics that learners think define a person as homosexual.
- Talking About Being “Out”
- Uncovering Attitudes About Sexual Orientation
- Introduce the concepts of homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality
- Heterosexuality leads to the notion of women as inherently “weak” and the institutionalized inequality of power.
And there is more and more.
The media falsely tells the story that Dobson is calling SpongeBob gay. Dobson never said SpongeBob is gay. He was pointing out that the We Are Family Foundation clearly is a pro-homosexual organization - and he is right. The video and lesson plans are going to 61,000 schools. I think the parents should know what’s coming and what We Are Family Foundation stands for.
Comment by Rzebro — Monday, 31 January 2005 @ 6:13 pm
I’ve looked at the We are Family site previously, and it seems more than harmless to me. I’d say it’s a good organization. It’s stated mission is to “[celebrate] our common humanity and the vision of a global family by creating and supporting programs that inspire and educate individuals of all ages about diversity, understanding, respect and multiculturalism; and to support those who are victims of intolerance.”
I don’t know where you found the information you cite in your response, but it must be buried pretty deep in the site. People who are afraid the culture can turn their otherwise “straight” kids gay are just paranoid. If sexuality is genetic, then no matter the culture, a child’s sexuality is fixed; if sexuality is a choice, then what are you worried about? Parenting should keep a child straight, right?
Incidentally, did you choose to be heterosexual? I know I didn’t. But I am, nonetheless. Maybe there ought to be organizations like NARTH for heterosexuals who would like to choose to be homosexual.
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 31 January 2005 @ 7:34 pm
Matt, btw, the church we now attend is UCC. Solid people who rightly emphasize grace–the essential and unique trait of christianity in my opinion.
Comment by Todd — Monday, 31 January 2005 @ 8:17 pm