Petition Asks Bert And Ernie To Get Married On Sesame Street
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Should Bert and Ernie get married? Over 900 people think so.
A petition started by Lair Scott, exhorts the makers of Sesame Street to let the two old friends get hitched. Gay marriage became legal in New York this June, increasing the number of states in the country to do so to six.
The petition letter reads:
In this horrific age of LGBT kids taking their own lives, they need to know that they ARE BEAUTIFUL and their lives are worth living. Aside from those that are committing suicide, the bullies that facilitate these tragedies need to learn that homophobia is NOT okay. They need to know that acceptance of their fellow human beings would indeed plant a seed of peace that will reverberate throughout the world. We are not asking that Sesame Street do anything crude or disrespectful by allowing Bert & Ernie to marry. It can be done in a tasteful way. Let us teach tolerance of those that are different. Let Sesame Street and PBS Kids be a big part in saving many worthy lives.
The pair of puppets has long been rumored to be a veiled representation of a gay couple, though the Children's Television Workshop has denied that this is the case.
The petition echoes the message of the "It Gets Better" project, founded in 2010 following the suicides of a number of young gay men, including Tyler Clementi, Billy Lucas and others.
Reactions thus far have been mixed. An editorial in the New York Daily News, headlined "Folks who want a gay marriage for Bert and Ernie of 'Sesame Street' need to get over themselves," went on to say:
"Why stop there? Why not march Yogi Bear and Boo Boo down the aisle, too?… Some stages of life - for example, the years from 2 to 4 - must be walled off from the passions of adults."
Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress agrees, but for different reasons. If Bert and Ernie were gay, she would be all for a marriage, but Rosenberg has a problem with same-sex roommates being equated with gay couples.
"I think it’s actively unhelpful to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple," Rosenberg wrote. "Having close, affectionate friendships with another man doesn’t mean that you two are sleeping together."
Twitter is just starting to buzz with reactions. Many are encouraging circulating the petition, some are incredulous and others are having a laugh -- one user quipped that it Batman and Robin should be first.
Since its start in 1969, Sesame Street has traditionally taken on difficult subjects in an effort to educate children, including divorce, tolerance of racial diversity, and real life disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Recently, Archie Comics introduced its first gay character in Veronica. The first same-sex marriage on daytime TV occurred in 2009, on the soap opera "All My Children."
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Bert And Ernie Gay Marriage? Sesame Street Says No
Bert and Ernie will not be getting married. To each other, or anyone else.
The demands of a petition calling for Bert and Ernie to get married, which has become an internet sensation in the last few years, has been gently denied by the Sesame Street Workshop, who issued this statement on their Facebook page:
Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets
do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.This isn't the first time the organization has moved to deny a sexual relationship between their two roommate puppets; in June 2010, a tweet sent from the Sesame Street Twitter account from Bert that said his mohawk was more "mo" than "hawk" was suspected by bloggers to be a sort of coded acknowledgment of their relationship.
Bloggers also took as a hint the large number of gay guest stars from that season, to which Sesame Street responded, "We've always reached out to a variety of actors and athletes and celebrities to appear on the show, and our programming has always appealed to adults as much as children."
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There is at least one petition out right now with 5,000 signatures requesting that Sesame Street puppets Bert and Ernie get married. You've probably read about it and maybe it seems like harmless amusement from people whose heart is in the right place in the realm of gay-marriage rights. There is just one problem. Bert and Ernie are not gay. The producers of Sesame Street have said as much. Since Bert and Ernie are fictional characters, said producers are the final word on such a subject. Want to know how I know Dumbledore is gay, even though not one reference to his sexuality is made during all seven Harry Potter books? Because JK Rowling told me as much. She created the character and if she says he's gay, then he's gay. And if the producers of Sesame Street say that Bert and Ernie are merely platonic friends living asexually in the same apartment, then one must accept them at their word. Bert and Ernie are not gay, therefore there is little-to-no chance that they are in the kind of romantic relationship that brings about marriage, thus they should not be getting married.
But they are two guys living together! But they are both well-dressed, polite, and neat! But they obviously aren't family and seem to spend much of their time together! So obviously they are secretly gay, right? No. I discussed this back in January 2010 (Click here), but the answer is still no. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are not homosexuals. Batman and Robin don't make-out in the Batcave after the last villain is sent to Arkham. Sam is not Frodo's unrequited gay lover. Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr do not secretly have the hots for each other. Time and time again, we of the pundit class constantly decide, no matter how thin the evidence, that any two men or boys who have any kind of friendship or emotional attachment to each other are clearly involved in some kind of homosexual relationship. Hell, in my younger days, I made the Bert/Ernie jokes as well as part of a larger rant about the unusual demographic makeup of Sesame Street (i.e. you have an obsessive-compulsive eater, a six-foot bird with gender-identity issues, a homeless, depressive hoarder, and a vampire!). But this kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge foolery masks a deeper strain of homophobia at its root. And its acceptance by those who wield critical and societal authority teaches a horrible lesson.
By the constant need to ascribe homosexual leanings to any two men who happen to be in the same room together for more than a few minutes, we are in fact teaching a terrible lesson to society and especially to young men. We are in fact teaching them that any kind of emotional connection between two males is in fact 'gay'. We are teaching that any kind of emotional connection between male fictional characters is to be ridiculed and considered 'queer'. No, there is no such thing as two men or young boys being close friends and even having an emotional connection. Nope, they OBVIOUSLY have to be secretly gay and/or in love with each other. Bring that down to a societal level, especially one such as ours that still often punishes homosexuality, and you have an entire generation of men and boys who are convinced that being friends with another 'dude' on any level other than surface-level will cause them to be called out as 'gay'. And, if it must be said, this kind of automatic presumption of homosexuality is indeed an insult to actual gay men. It is insulting both in its content (it doesn't take real homosexuality seriously) and its reaction (the constant teasing and mockery). Sometimes, two guys hanging out together, be it for solving crime or teaching the alphabet, are really just friends.
Bert and Ernie are just friends. I know that because the producers of Sesame Street told me so. Does the Gay Rights Movement really want to be seen as forcing two men to get married irrespective of their actual say in the matter? Just because they are close friends who both happen to be male doesn't meant that they are secretly lovers pining to get married. In a nation where real gay couples are unable to get married in their home state, it is an insult and a cheapening of their real love to demand that two fictional television puppets get married just because they fit into certain gay stereotypes. There is plenty of work left to do in the struggle for equal rights for the LGBT community. Those involved (and those who support their struggles) surely have more important things to do then forcing two unwilling Muppets to tie the knot. And they certainly don't want to send the message to men everywhere that a man can't be kind and friendly to another man without being considered homosexual. Real men, regardless of sexual orientation, can be friends with other men.
Scott Mendelson
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Ok, lets go with Scott's reasoning here.
If they are not gay, then why did the producers use the code phrase "life long bachelors" when describing them?
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"Sam is not Frodo's unrequited gay lover." Yea riiiiiight
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Now that's just sad… I'm not quite sure if they really mean what they said, or if it's just a code for "that's a subject that's too controversial for us to even begin to touch, so we're just going to say no"... Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?
