Earlier this week, a participant on change.org launched an online petition for Sesame Street to "let" Bert and Ernie get married. I'm a strong advocate of marriage equality and LGBT rights, but here's why I think this petition is ill-advised.
Sesame Street curriculum is built around insightful research into children's lives and learning. When Takalani Sesame in South Africa added an HIV+ character, it was because research indicated it was a pervasive issue in children's lives there. The need and opportunity existed to help children learn both facts about, and compassion for, people with an illness that was devastating families.
At the time, there was outcry in the US that such a character might be introduced on Sesame Street here. I was pre-interviewed and rejected for an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, because I refused to say the program absolutely should do so; my view was that, if HIV became an issue salient to American toddlers, Sesame Workshop would find the right way to talk to children about it.
With the marriage petition, the impetus is coming from adults' perspective. There have long been "rumors" about Bert and Ernie, always from adults (honestly, when was the last time you heard a toddler ask why they live together?).
Sesame Workshop has always dealt with the problem with a single, sensible message: Bert and Ernie are Muppets. They do not have a sexual orientation.
So, while the petitioners ask that the producers "allow" them to marry, it's not as though Bert and Ernie have been pleading for permission over the years.
No other television program -- for adults or children -- has done what Sesame Street has, worldwide, to foster and celebrate diversity. Recently, I had cause to watch the first-ever episode: imagine the shock of turning on the TV for your child in 1969 (anticipating the usual Looney Tunes or Flintstones) and finding a multi-racial mix of humans and Muppets, living on a gritty city street and teaching your child about letters, numbers and getting along with each other. Since then, Sesame Street and its global adaptations have portrayed models for gender equality, Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, rights for those with disabilities, the above-mentioned empathy for those with HIV, and much more.
Rest assured, as marriage equality spreads, if Sesame Workshop finds that children have questions or need models for same-sex marriage, its researchers, writers and producers will collaborate to find the most age-appropriate means to introduce the concept, on the storyline.
Forcing long-running characters to take on this role, primarily because long ago adults put their own, cynical spin onto Bert and Ernie, is the wrong way to go about it.
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What is "cynical" about positing that twoamales in an obviously committed relationship may be gay? Is it cynical to observe that Miss Piggy expresses traditionally heterosexual romantic deires for a male member of another species?
Cynical may be inexact, but children's television regularly has to deal with adults who have trouble allowing kids' experience to be childlike. Tinky Winky must be gay because he carries a bag. Thomas the Tank Engine is a veiled conservative allegory (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6772592/Thomas-the-Tank-Engine-attacked-for-conservative-political-ideology.html). It wasn't children who started sites like alt.Barney.die.die.die (wow, that goes back a ways!).
We expropriate things made for kids to adult purposes (even if, as in the "let Bert and Ernie marry" petition, we think we're being supportive), and then wonder why kids grow up cynical, or at least grow up too fast.
If Sesame Workshop were to introduce married gay characters, those characters would be adults. And probably portrayed by humans, rather than puppets.
Elmo, Zoe, and Big Bird are children. Bert and Ernie seem to be more of a grey area to me.
I agree that if there will be gay characters, they should be humans first.
I think I was about 13 when I first thought that Bert & Ernie were gay; reminded me of a silly married couple I knew; a goofy guy & his icy wife. She wore the pants in that family.
A man and his son are in a car crash. The man's dead on the scene, but the son's critical. The kid's taken to the ER, but the trauma doctor says "I can't operate on this kid! He's my son!" upon seeing him for the first time. How's the kid related to the doctor?
Greatest Generation and before will vaporlock, insisting that the man in the crash was an uncle or the doctor's confused.
Baby Boomers through Generation X and maybe Gen Y will say "The doctor's his mom."
Gen Y and onward will either say "The doctor's his mom" or "The doctor's his other dad," depending on their own home life.
Methinks the really young children these days won't need a TV show to explain such things to them.