Lock up your children: the Traditional Values Coalition warns parents that letting your kids watch Shrek 2 means they’ll become crazed, crossdressing deviants.

DreamWorks is… promoting cross dressing and transgenderism in this animated film.

I have every sympathy with parents who worry about the increasing vulgarity, commercialism and violence of a lot of TV programming and movies, but this knee-jerk nonsense detracts from that. We’ve had cross-dressing cartoon characters since the days of Bugs Bunny (and of course, British humour from Monty Python to Little Britain has a good chuckle at blokes in drag) for one simple reason: it’s funny. Bugs Bunny in a frock didn’t bring down civilisation forty years ago, and a minor character in Shrek 2 won’t either.

Once again the self-appointed guardians of decency are getting their knickers in a twist (pun intended) over something that really doesn’t matter, but while it’s fun to laugh at them, it’s important to realise that such groups can be dangerous. Take our old pals Christian Voice, who are still upset about Jerry Springer: The Opera.

According to this story from the Independent [which is now pay-to-read, unfortunately]:

A leading cancer charity has taken the extraordinary decision to turn down a gift of up to £10,000 after coming under pressure from militant Christian opponents of Jerry Springer – The Opera, who told them it was not in their interest to accept “tainted” money from a charity performance.

Maggie’s Centres, based in Scotland, was to have used the money to help establish a nationwide network of units for cancer sufferers and their families. But, a phone call from the Christian Voice group led the charity to fear a religious boycott of its fundraising activities if it accepted the cash.

I do my best to avoid bad language on this blog, but… what the fuck?

According to the Independent, Christian Voice’s Steven Green said:

All I did was explain that if they carried on they would cause offence to Christians, who are known for being generous, and they would probably do far better to forgo the few thousand pounds they would get out of the performance.

Or to paraphrase: “Nice charity you’ve got here. We wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to it, would we?” Fearing a mass boycott by caring, sharing, compassionate Christians, the charity turns down ten grand of donations. Ten grand that would make a huge difference to cancer sufferers and their families.

I’ll stop now. I’m too angry to type.

[Update]

It seems the £10,000 figure was potential revenue; apparently only 300 people turned up to the £10-per-ticket show, which therefore raised £3K. Still, £3K to a cancer charity’s a lot of cash.

There’s now a discussion on MetaFilter about the story, and it’s likely to get lively.