It’s a talking sponge, for crying out loud

It would be fun to say SpongeBob SquarePants lost his yellow cool in an interview, but it wouldn’t be true.

No, it was Tom Kenny, one of the premier “voicers” for children’s cartoons on television, who offered an emotional defense for the famous sponge.

Kenny spoke by telephone from California, where a friend had just read him a story from the New York Times. It concerned a dinner speech Tuesday in Washington, D.C., where some conservative Christian groups celebrated the inauguration of President George W. Bush.

According to the Times, James Dobson, founder of a group called Focus on the Family, told the audience that SpongeBob had taken part in a “pro-homosexual video.”

In the same story, Paul Batura, an assistant to Dobson, described the video as an “insidious” means of “manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids.”

At this point, it’s best to step back and listen to Kenny, who has provided SpongeBob’s voice since the beginning of the show.

“What reaction can one have except for gales of hysterical laughter at these people’s wrong-headedness and irrational thinking?” Kenny said. “I love it. I’m glad these people are around, because with the coronation going on we all need something to laugh about.

“I could maybe see it their way if this was a video with Barbra Streisand and Madonna and Judy Garland,” Kenny said, making a tongue-in-cheek reference to performers who supposedly have large gay followings. “We’re talking about cartoon characters here, and these people are just trying to make a video that (says) it’s a positive, good thing to be respectful of people different than you.

“Let me ask you, who would you rather go bowling with, SpongeBob and his friends or (James) Dobson? Who would you rather go out with and have a few beers? Probably the only common ground I have with (Dobson) is that I haven’t seen the video, and I’ll bet he hasn’t either. All he knows (here Kenny dropped into an angry backwoods voice) is that it’s a little yellow guy full of holes who’s saying it’s OK for men to be with men.

“It’s very entertaining. The entertainment industry could use more people with that kind of wild imagination.”

And then Kenny took a breath.

The backdrop for the furor is that SpongeBob joined with such children’s characters as Arthur the aardvark, Big Bird, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Jimmy Neutron in making a video of the famous “We Are Family” disco song, a video that will be distributed to some 61,000 schools by the We Are Family Foundation.

According to its Web site, www.wearefamilyfoundation.org, the group was created to promote global unity and healing after the Sept. 11 attacks.

As part of its mission, the foundation offers a rainbow-hued heart and a “tolerance pledge” that includes this sentence: “I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own.”

That’s apparently what upset Dobson.

To Kenny, who describes his feelings on SpongeBob as “proprietary,” anyone who feels contempt for the talking sponge also feels contempt for him.

“I look around and, speaking as a parent of two children, I don’t need people like Dr. Dobson policing what my children see in school. You don’t get any more of a normal American lifestyle than me. I go to soccer practices. I’ve got two kids. My wife and I live in the suburbs. As a parent, I look around this world that seems to be a mess, and a lot of it is due to people being intolerant of races, nationalities, creeds and lifestyles.

“That term (Batura) uses … ‘insidious brainwashing.’ There’s insidiousness to tolerance? Tolerance is somehow insidious? The last time I checked, tolerance and friendship and open-mindedness weren’t exclusively the domain of people who lean to the left or homosexuals.”

Kenny suspects Dobson’s wrath began building after a 2002 article in the Wall Street Journal said SpongeBob and his friend Patrick, the pink starfish, had managed to “capture the imagination” of gay men.

“SpongeBob a gay icon? I see no evidence of that,” Kenny said. “Talking to friends of mine in that community, they say, ‘Yeah, I like SpongeBob, but everybody likes SpongeBob.’ Our focus is on the funny. We’re too busy with a show filled with absurd gags to take time to insert any political spin. It’s not even on our radar screen.”

That got Kenny thinking about the kind of people who burn books, and he wondered out loud if Dobson plans to start burning SpongeBob videos, and then Kenny laughed and mentioned the marketing upside of intolerance:

“I would say, why buy one to burn? Buy two, buy three, buy four!”