A Muppet page I follow on Facebook posted this:
And of course, there were lots of people pissed about it,
calling it “grooming” and other such bullshit.
I responded by posting this:
“It's weird that so many people raised on the Muppets are
mad about this. Miss Piggy is just Frank Oz's drag persona, Bert and Ernie have
been ‘roommates’ for half a century, and the entire cast of the Muppet Show was
a bunch of singing dancing animated fur suits, who put on a musical with
Elton John once. And every episode they told you to be kind to everyone no
matter how different they were from you. Kermit wanted you to understand that
it's not easy being green in a world where most of your peers aren't. How did
so many of you fail to get the whole point of the shows?”
Any reasonable person would have recognized that the first
half about “roommates” and “fur suits” was tongue in cheek, while the second
half about “treating people kindly” was serious. But of course, bigots aren’t
reasonable people, and there were lots of people jumping in to “well, ACTUALLY”
the thing about Bert and Ernie.
I should have foreseen that a bunch of people would jump on
the joke about Bert and Ernie and take it literally, while ignoring the part
they were SUPPOSED to take literally (about being kind to those who are
different.)
But it’s not really surprising,
given how many people take the Bible literally in the half dozen verses where
it says awful things about LGBTQ people* but ignore the thousands of verses
that tell them to be kind to everyone, even people they see as enemies, and
treat people as they'd want to be treated.
If Jesus of Nazareth can't get his
fans to follow the Golden Rule, I guess Kermit the Frog never had a chance.
*Note- the verses where the book
supposedly condemns LGBTQ people are based on questionable translations, while
the verses where it tells people to be kind to everyone are unquestionably
translated correctly.
