MORE ON THE OUTING OF SPONGEBOB

First off, it appears that this entire comedy was born of a misunderstanding. From AlterNet:

As it turns out, the whackos who originally led the attack on the We Are Family Foundation had logged onto the wrong web site in their search for ammunition. Rather than boot up the Foundation's site, www.wearefamilyfoundation.org, they'd mistakenly gone to the home page of the similarly named We Are Family organization (www.waf.org), which is, indeed, a gay and lesbian resource site. But instead of fessing up to messing up – especially now that the media was running with (and laughing at) the story – the resourceful Christians doubled back onto the Foundation's site, found the tolerance pledge, and had the smoking sponge they needed.

So the fundamentalists really thought they had something. When it turned out that they didn't, they went after what they could, the notion of tolerance itself:

Quicker than you can say, I can't believe they're going after a cartoon sponge, Dobson's cronies in the holier-than-thou contingent weighed in on the underwater turbulence.

"Tolerance" and "diversity" are part of a "coded language that is regularly used by the homosexual community," said a spokesman from the reliably over-caffeinated Family Research Council; while Donald Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association and reigning Chicken Little of moral depravity, warned parents everywhere to be on the lookout for the sinful video making its way into their kids' classrooms.

Click here for the rest.

During the summer of 1985, I went to a Southern Baptist youth camp up in the mountains near Glorieta, New Mexico. I was surprised by one of the memes that the adults were circulating around the camp. The anti-starvation charity song "We Are the World" was still on the charts. I had already become bored with it (except for, maybe, the Ray Charles verse), because the radio was playing it constantly and MTV had the video in heavy rotation. But the grandiose pop symphony really seemed to light the passions of our counselors at camp.

They hated it, which is understandable, but not because the song was kind of sucky. No, these guys had weird theological problems with the lyrics. They objected first and foremost to the notion that "we are the world." They quoted a few New Testament verses to the effect that Christians are somehow distinct among humanity; "be in the world, but not of it," says the Bible. "We are not the world," they told me repeatedly. To a lesser degree they had a problem with the line "we're saving our own lives," because, of course, only Jesus can save.

Screwy, right? Not to them, and the proponents of these ideas did a pretty good job of pulling lots of teenagers over to their side. Fortunately (I guess), I was unconvinced. Even though I was still a believer at the time, their reasoning on this seemed absurd: clearly, they had taken the lyrics wildly out of context, applying a strange sort of Biblical interpretation to these bland, near-meaningless, feel-good words. It was for me an omen of my future disgust with fundamentalism's lunacy.

The moral to this tale is that fundamentalists seem to be incapable of supporting any charitable effort that hasn't been generated by them. The problem is their unwillingness to join with any organization or institution that doesn't embrace fundamentalist philosophy as its core value--tolerance is okay, as long as it's a Christian tolerance. Consequently, SpongeBob is gay, and "diversity" means promoting homosexuality. For fundamentalists, it's clearly their way or the highway.

Of course, bashing tolerance is rhetorically quite a dangerous thing, as this post from David Neiwert over at Orcinus shows.

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