Nonsensical:

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” “SpongeBob SquarePants!” Thanks to an anti-homosexual attack from America’s Christian right and a media fuss ignited by the American Family Association and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, this cartoon character is well on his way to culture-war immortality, up there with those moral saboteurs Murphy Brown and Tinky Winky.

It’s not that Dobson has a problem with Mr. SquarePants per se. He is angry about a video made for grade schools by the We Are Family Foundation that features SpongeBob and other TV characters. It doesn’t mention sex. But the foundation’s Web site says this: “I pledge to have respect for people whose beliefs, culture, sexual identity ... are different from my own.” How could anyone be against that? Dobson is. He has denounced the video as corrupting children with a homosexual agenda.

We find it strange that Dobson has not taken aim at SpongeBob himself, who is naughty enough to give many parents pause. After “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” came out, a Christian family web site made a list of worrisome bits, including “cartoon nudity, repeatedly.”

Kids spend hours watching telly, absorbing mushy messages of tolerance until their brains run out their ears. There may be a threat in all that, but Dobson seems to have missed it entirely. — The New York Times