Some Grown-Ups Are Just Plain Stupid!

Innocent Until Proven Guilty: Bert & Ernie are just
two loveable Sesame Street characters and nothing more

Intro

If you happen to be a friend of mine on Facebook, perhaps you noticed the following comment in my status box yesterday afternoon...

Well, I guess I'm guilty of "living under a rock" and so be it! I never knew that people have been questioning whether or not Bert & Ernie are gay. Oh, come on people... they're just a couple of harmless muppet characters for kids to enjoy! Why must adults always ruin innocent stuff for kids w/ grown-up crap? Let kids be kids while they can! They'll become adults soon enough without you pushing them into it before they're ready! Sorry for the rant, but I'm just plain angry over this mess!

Now, I invite you to read the ridiculous article I stumbled upon on the Metro (Philadelphia) website yesterday, which was the cause of my rant. I also added a link for this article to my FB status...

Have Bert & Ernie Come Out On Twitter?

The mystery surrounding the sexual preferences of Bert and Ernie, the beloved yellow-and-orange roommate puppets from the classic children’s TV series “Sesame Street”, is nothing new; but an official tweet on Twitter, allegedly from Bert, has renewed the question in the mass media.

On June 11th (9:56am), in anticipation of the recent film adaptation of the "A-Team," Bert allegedly pontificated on Twitter: "Ever notice how similar my hair is to Mr. T’s? The only difference is mine is a little more 'mo,' a little less 'hawk'."

Casting aside the question of whether a pair of hand puppets can be categorized as gay, there seems little doubt as to the meaning of the tweet. According to the online slang Rosetta Stone Urban Dictionary, "mo" can mean one of two things: "Modus Operandi," which makes little sense in this context, and an abbreviation of "homosexual."

Sesame [Street] Workshop has long denied the rumors... "Bert and Ernie do not portray a gay couple," the organization officially stated in 1993. According to the company line from Sesame Workshop, the characters are merely an "Odd Couple"-esque pairing, designed to show that friendship can transcend differences. Whether or not the TV-viewing crowd can do the same is up to debate.

However, in 1994, Rev. Joseph Chambers, a Pentecostal minister from North Carolina and author of "Barney: The Purple Messiah," attempted to get the colorful pair banned under state anti-sodomy laws. Chambers railed... "Bert and Ernie are two grown men sharing a house and a bedroom. They share clothes, eat and cook together, and have blatantly effeminate characteristics. In one show Bert teaches Ernie how to sew. If this isn’t meant to represent a homosexual union, I can’t imagine what it’s supposed to represent."

Gary Knell, Sesame [Street] Workshop CEO, said... "They are not gay, they are not straight, they are puppets... so they don’t exist below the waist!"

Outro

I cannot believe that grown people are actually questioning the "sexual preference" of two Muppets characters! Good comeback, Gary... "puppets don't exist below the waist." But, unfortunately, people who are "dead from the neck up", like Chambers, do exist.

As mentioned earlier, some of you may recall that the North Carolina minister "went off the rails" over another beloved children's character several years ago. Chambers cites in his booklet "Barney: The Purple Messiah," an episode in which the friendly dinosaur conjures up Mother Goose, who pops-up out of a book of nursery rhymes, by uttering "Shimboree, shimborah", which is a common expression heard on the TV show. Chambers claims this sequence is really a "seance".

"I'm not on a crusade," the minister insisted and describes the series as an insidious attack on families. "They transcend the real and get into New Age philosophy. It's absolutely antithesis to the Bible. For instance, families never appear, leaving Barney to provide the comfort, joys, and instructions of everyday life. Mama is kept apart, so Barney is a secret. The real family is excluded. And to a Christian, Jesus should be a child's next best friend," he says.

Chambers also accuses Barney of endorsing too much diversity. "When it comes to a moral lifestyle, I'm not for teaching people that pedophiles and homosexuals are on the same level" as parents, he says. "The program is a politically correct extreme of the liberal-left agenda."

Further, he writes in his booklet... "When you mix captivating entertainment, catchy songs, and emotionally satisfying music with a message that glorifies the creator of all of it, you have the making of a cult. Barney has become the leader of a children's cult."

Now, after those ridiculous ramblings, I rest my case. I admit that when I was raising my daughter, she never watched Barney too much because he didn't appeal to her personal taste when she was a child. She was also too young to know anything about all the controversy going on about him at the time. And, guess what? I didn't make it my business to bring it to her attention either. But today, both of my grandchildren love watching Barney. I've also watched it with them several times and I just don't understand what all the fuss was about.

So, no disrepect intended to Chambers as a minister or to his ministry... but I'm sorry to say that, as a person, he sounds like a total idiot! On second thought, if I were a member of his church, these ramblings would cause me to think twice about him as a pastoral leader. In my mind (and to turn his own sense of logic back on him), there are several statements he made that have underlying negative "connotations" and cause for concern about his thinking on a wide variety of issues. What was that saying again? Oh yeah... the one about "the way a man thinketh...?"