Television changes, stupidity is immutable

I watched the last installment of Guardians of the Galaxy feeling something between chagrin and hope. Chagrin because it touched upon animal experimentation. Hope because of its message against the practice, which led me to imagine that, if that message reached every child watching it, we would end animal abuse within a generation. It didn’t take me long to see my mistake: no matter how much some people go on about it, children don’t do what they see on television. Despite so much overacting, The Squid Game did not decimate schools, nor is there any record of preschoolers playing with their penises after watching John Dillermand, a Danish show about a man with a prehensile penis. Rather than the subject matter, kids seem to focus more on the colors. Most of us adults don’t go much further than that, either.

But this is not the case for parents fired up by a bison who defines herself as non-binary on the Netflix children’s series Ridley Jones, nor those who fired a Florida teacher who screened the Disney film Strange World, for fear that it would homosexualize the entire classroom. The fact that, until very recently, homosexuals grew up without seeing any LGBTQ+ characters on screen did not temper their self-righteous fury. The battle against common sense is an arduous one, but their own warlike zeal is inexhaustible.

Those who are now going ballistic over alleged LGBTQ+ indoctrination probably grew up with Ranma 1/2, a Japanese animation series about a boy who became a girl when he got wet; or with Baron Ashler, who was both a man and a woman in another Japanese series from the 1980s, Tranzor Z. In fact they probably did not even notice the sexual ambiguity. But the guardians of morality did notice. After being additionally accused of supporting nazism and marxism, it was pulled from the airwaves in Spain, thus saving millions of children from falling into the arms of hermaphroditism and various other isms. Television changes, stupidity is immutable.

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