The battle for kids' TV: after the Buster and SpongeBob controversies, is there a place for queer lives on children's TV?

When Focus on the Family founder James Dobson raised a ruckus in January about SpongeBob Square-Pants's appearance in what he dubbed a "pro-homosexual video" designed to promote diversity to schoolchildren, it was so widely (and erroneously) assumed that Dobson had said SpongeBob himself was gay that the cartoon hero's creator, Stephen Hillenburg, felt compelled to explain to the press that the character was, in fact, "asexual."

Gay people, an increasingly common sight within mainstream pop culture, are still personae non gram within the multibillion-dollar children's programming industry, and Dobson's reaction to even a passing association between a beloved kids' TV icon and the so-called gay agenda seems to be just a sign of things to come--especially when it comes to portrayals of families with gay parents.

"When [my kids] were a little bit younger, I had a lot of trouble finding books or videos or things that I could use to help them understand that they were as valid as any other children of any other family structure in the country," says Karen Pike, 42, who with her partner, Gillian Pieper, raises three children in Vermont. "There's nothing there. It's as if we do not exist."

Pike knows of what she speaks. Just last month, her family found themselves at the center of a very public battle between three of the biggest voices in educational programming: PBS, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, and Boston public television station WGBH. Last year Pike, Pieper, and their three children, Emma, David, and James, were filmed for the "Sugartime!" episode of WGBH's Postcards From Buster, a series designed to showcase the broad spectrum of different families in the United States.

In January, after one day on the job, Secretary Spellings made public a letter she sent to PBS CEO Pat Mitchell strongly criticizing the network for producing the episode, explaining that "many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode." (Two thirds of the show's budget is from a federal Ready to Learn grant administered by the Department of Education.) PBS, meanwhile, insists it had already decided to pull the episode from distribution a few hours before receiving Spellings's letter, which prompted a defiant WGBH to send the episode directly to at least 45 PBS affiliates who wished to broadcast it.

"We need to give children a lot of credit," says WGBH vice president of communications Jeanne Hopkins. "Kids can handle this--if they even notice. There will be some kids who watch it who won't even recognize that there are two rooms here and that that means anything."

That's exactly the problem, according to PBS senior programming vice president John Wilson, who argues that the episode was treating a giant pink elephant like it was just part of the scenery. It featured Pike and Pieper along with another lesbian couple for a total of about six minutes, and only briefly touched on the gay parent angle--after Emma shows off her mothers' family portrait, we hear cartoon narrator Buster exclaim, "Boy, that's a lot of morns!" Explains Wilson: "It became clear that that issue was so sensitive and so charged in today's environment that it continued to intrude into the foreground.... We weren't making the most of a learning moment, and it was clearly getting in the way of what the point of the episode was"--maple syrup and Vermont's mud season.

The thing is, Pike and Pieper were proud of the fact that their relationship was no big deal, and what's galling to them is that in a series devoted to featuring diverse families--including shows about Pentecostal Christians and Muslims, grandparents as parents, and five siblings who sleep in one bed in a trailer--theirs was the family singled out as inappropriate, or at the very least too controversial.

"What kind of message does this send to my children and to all the children that they go to school with?" demands Pike. "That we don't [exist], so you can bully [my kids], so you can call them 'faggot'? We seem to be the lost segment, the last minority that the government is actually saying it's OK to discriminate against. That's remarkable to me." Wilson, it should be noted, regrets that the couple "through no fault of their own" found themselves "left in the lurch because of this." He adds, "For that, I'm sorry."

So is there even a place for gay parents within children's media? Hopkins says WGBH has no plans to alter the types of programs it produces and broadcasts; Wilson, not surprisingly, is more careful with his answer. "If we were to tackle this [topic] with a children's program," he says, "we'd really have to do our homework to make sure that we're dealing with it age-appropriately, that we're respecting the beliefs and values and traditions of myriad people in the audience, and that we're accounting for little kids in the audience who aren't necessarily the focus of the curriculum."

Pieper, for her part, takes her cue from SpongeBob creator Hillenburg, explaining that while gay people are by definition a sexual minority, "the fact is that families are not sexual, and they shouldn't be. That's the thing that bothered me the most about [critics who say] we sexualize children at such a young age. Well, that's heterosexual adults who are doing that to children in mainstream media. This episode is no more sexualized that the rest of the [series]. I don't want to see what's sexual about the Muslim family or the family that's living in a trailer any more than I would want anybody to see that about my life. If we can separate sexual behavior from the identity of the people who are in gay families, I think we'd be a lot better off."