Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Idiot of the Day - Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of “Education”

Homophobia is alive and well in Washington.  The incoming Education Secretary, her second day on the job, fired off a letter to PBS because they had the audacity to show a lesbian couple making maple syrup in Vermont.  Apparently “Postcards from Buster”, a series about a rabbit who travels around North America learning about different cultures, is getting too edgy for the current administration.  As we all know, lesbians might convert little children and convince them that farming and making maple syrup is common and acceptable.

An excerpt from the letter: Spellings said “Congress’ and the Department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television.” Spelling continued by encouraging PBS to return the money spent on the episode to the department “in the interest of avoiding embroiling the Ready-to-Learn program in a controversy.”

Will this never end?  We’re spending untold billions of dollars on the “war” in Iraq, trying to force our flavor of democracy down their throats, but the really important thing is...we mustn’t let children know that gay people exist and do stuff like make syrup. 

I’m horrified.  I’ve forgotten that our parrots watch PBS every day in the bird room.  Will I have to tell Blackjack that she can only learn about Fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, guys who make lowrider bikes, the Arapaho tribe, surfers, Inuit igloo builders, et al?  The “...lesbian couple with adopted children in Vermont who accompany Buster to a sugarhouse, where maple syrup is made, and to a dairy farm, where they watch a cow being milked” will obviously be too much for my African Grey.  I know she’s smart, but is she smart enough to resist being turned into a lesbian by PBS?  Yes, her vocabulary is that of a two year old, but just the other day she splashed her water all over the floor - I’m sure that she’s going to want to milk a cow if PBS deigns to show that episode in Las Vegas.  Oh, the worries of a parrot in Vegas.  Gambling, liquor, showgirls and really hot summers.  Thank goodness the Secretary of Education is worried about television, instead of illiteracy.  And yeah, so what if those last couple of sentences didn’t flow?  I’m not the Secretary of Education, you know.

Next entry: Still Figuring Things Out Here Previous entry: Idiot of the Day - The Deficit

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