Families are being separated at the border, with sick children caring for one another and lacking food, water, and diapers. What is Republican Doug Lamborn, a Congressman representing Colorado, concerned about? In a phrase: Gay rat weddings.
If you remember not too long ago, gay rat weddings became, well, something of cultural phenomena. The popular kid’s TV series, Arthur, showed a same-sex wedding between a rat and an aardvark. The episode is aptly called “Mr. Ratburn and the Special Someone.” Adorable! Wonderful! Finally! But some people, including the entire state of Alabama, decided they didn’t want to air the episode. Because… Think of the children?
If that sounds like the start of a joke on The Onion, it isn’t. Here’s what Mike McKenzie, Alabama Public Television’s director of programming, said at the time, in a statement given to AL.com:
“Parents have trusted Alabama Public Television for more than 50 years to provide children’s programs that entertain, educate and inspire,” McKenzie said in his statement to AL.com. “More importantly — although we strongly encourage parents to watch television with their children and talk about what they have learned afterward — parents trust that their children can watch APT without their supervision. We also know that children who are younger than the ‘target’ audience for Arthur also watch the program.”
Now, during, of all months, Pride Month, Congressman Lamborn is harping on gay rat weddings. This time, he wants to defund PBS over it.
“PBS writers deemed it appropriate to preach their liberal views on same-sex marriage to America’s young children,” Lamborn wrote in a column for The Daily Signal. “Taxpayers now know with complete certainty that the goal of the PBS cartoon is to impart social liberalism to children. Enough is enough. It is time to stop sending our hard-earned tax money to support programming that is objectionable to many Americans.”
And what does he propose to do about it? Defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS, among other things.
The Congressman continued that he is, “reintroducing a bill to cut off all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS.” He went on to claim that “public media programming is becoming more antagonistic toward conservative and religious viewpoints” because nothing says antagonistic like threatening to defund an entire public broadcast.
Also: He has a history of wanting to defund things he doesn’t agree with. Like, when he wanted to defend the National Public Radio in 2017:
On Monday, he introduced the bill to end all federal funding for PBS. A shining light of hope, at least, is that the bill has no co-sponsors in the House. Still: Wouldn’t it be amazing if he was advocating for something to actually help people?