SpongeBob SquarePants and Wesley Snipes are having a long conversation about gender roles, and the male youth of this country are
watching intently.
Focus on the Family, a Christian organization designed to “preserve traditional values and the institution of the family,” has recently come out in protest against a video being produced for children in schools featuring a number of animated characters, including SpongeBob.
According to the Focus on the Family Web site, SpongeBob’s best (male) friend, Patrick, is pink. The two characters have also been spotted holding hands. A founder and chairman of Focus on the Family then goes on to say that a video promoting homosexuality should not be shown in schools. To his credit, Dr. Dobson claims to applaud the idea of increasing diversity (well, some diversity); the issue for him is that children will think teachers are endorsing a homosexual lifestyle because the term “sexual identity” is used when listing issues that deserve tolerance.
However, the division of church and state would surely mandate that the educational system has no reason to listen to the requests of this group. As a public institution, schools are doing their job by promoting diversity, period. Imagine instead an extremist group who didn’t believe in racial diversity because of their religion or culture, and therefore claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. Day should not be recognized or discussed in an educational setting. Schools would not even consider such a request, and Focus on the Family has a lot of nerve to deny the need for diversity tolerance in relation to sexuality or gender.
And then there’s Blade. The furor surrounding a chatty sea sponge became scarier after my late night viewing of Blade: Third Times The Ah Hell Let’s Just Kill Everything. This film provided an unfortunate example of what the current masculine gender identity has spawned into: He has really big muscles, a sword and about five lines of dialogue.
Is this what culture wants the boys of our nation to become? A positive role model of male-to-male bonding that doesn’t involve an elaborate vampire plot should be lauded, not made into headlines for being immoral. If boys grow up believing that to be feminine is to be gay, and to be gay is wrong, male aggression results. The idea that two men holding hands is an automatic signal for homosexuality signifies so much of what is problematic about rigid notions of gender. Fear is instilled into young men of becoming gentle, sympathetic people who develop platonic yet intimate relationships; surely our world has realized by now that machismo only leads to men committing nine times more murders than women.
Statistics such as these are not given any significance. It is expected that normal men commit aggressive acts; the nation utters a communal “boys will be boys.” There has been no large-scale effort to uncover the reason why men commit so many acts of violence and, until there is, this aggression will surely continue. Disgracing a feminine icon for male children only entrenches the message further that men who hold hands with friends are going to Hell, so go load up that AK-47 and we’ll shoot ourselves some loose women for dinner. If men committing murder is acceptable, but holding hands with your best male friend isn’t, groups such as Focus on the Family need to evaluate this fallacy.
The Christian right (or wrong) has surely realized the frailty of its own belief system if it fears that an animated yellow sponge has the power to brainwash children. Will kids see a sea sponge holding hands with a (pink) starfish and think, “Yeah, sleeping with people of the same gender is a good idea!” That’s almost as ridiculous as claiming that some laws set down by god-knows-who over 2,000 years ago could still hold
true today.

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