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One of Margaret Spellings's first official acts as George W. Bush's new Secretary of Education was to sideswipe the First Amendment in an effort to save America's youth from exposure to lesbian moms.

In a January 25 letter to PBS president Pat Mitchell, Spellings denounced an upcoming installment of Postcards from Buster, a children's series funded in part by the federal Ready-to-Learn program. Combining animation and live-action footage, the series depicts the adventures of a cartoon rabbit, Buster Baxter, who teaches language skills while touring America. Wherever the peripatetic bunny goes, he interacts with non-cartoon representatives of local ethnic and cultural groups. The segment unacceptable to the US Department of Education (DOE) would, as Spellings put it, "feature throughout the show families headed by gay couples."

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The episode, "Sugartime!," shows Buster encountering two pairs of lesbian partners in the course of a trip to Vermont. Spellings insisted that if "Sugartime!" were to be aired at all, it would have to be shorn of the DOE seal, and that member stations would have to be warned of its content. She suggested that DOE funding used to produce the segment be returned.

"Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode," wrote Spellings. "Congress and the Department's purpose in funding this programming was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television."

Postcards from Buster was developed in response to a Ready-to-Learn request for programming proposals that read in part: "Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric of the series to help children understand and respect differences and learn to live in a multicultural society. The series will avoid stereotypical images... and show modern multi-ethnic/lingual/cultural families and children." The statement fails to note that DOE's notion of diversity excludes gay families.

The Public Broadcasting System, which hastens to cave in under government pressure, agreed at once to withhold the episode from the 349 affiliate stations that would normally air it. Mitchell ordered an internal review of the production process that gave the show's content a green light. The nonprofit network, created by Congress in 1967 and supported in part by public funds, has repeatedly been accused by right-wing activists of spreading homosexual propaganda. In this case, PBS is claiming to have seen the light and recognized that "Sugartime!" includes material too "sensitive" for certain viewers.

The real danger is that "Sugartime!" might convince children that lesbianism has something to do with obtaining maple sugar, buying cheese, and making lasagna. The word lesbian is, however, never uttered; partner gets one mention. The women are on screen, individually and together, for five of the episode's 30 minutes, and are never seen expressing affection. What really disturbs Spellings seems to be the normalcy of these female partners' quotidian middle-class lives.

Vermont, which in 2000 gave same-sex couples access to civil unions verging on marriage, has a large gay population. The visibility of lesbian mothers (and gay fathers) is taken for granted in the Green Mountain State, so it seems apt that Buster's visit to the region would matter-of-factly include them. When Buster visited Utah, he encountered Mormons. Since the show first aired in October 2004, he has met, among other segments of the population, Pentecostals, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, African Americans, Native Americans, and members of a Hmong enclave in Wisconsin.

Bestial perversity?

Postcards from Buster is a spinoff of Arthur the Aardvark, a popular children's program featuring characters created by author/illustrator Marc Brown. A sensitive, asthmatic young bunny who loves taking naps, Buster is Arthur's best friend. People from opposite poles of political silliness-- the sort who made similar assumptions about Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, and the Teletubby Winky Tink-- have speculated that Buster's involvement with Arthur might extend to interspecies same-sex hanky-panky.

A few years ago, Margaret Spellings might not have cared about the social relations of cartoon animals. Spellings, 48, who succeeded the lackluster Rod Paige as Education Secretary on January 24, has been married twice. In 2001, when she arrived in Washington, she was a single mother. Asked by a C-SPAN interviewer to comment on statistics showing the traditional family in decline, she spoke approvingly of non-traditional families. Her remarks incurred the wrath of the Christian Right. It seems likely that in condemning "Sugartime!," Spellings meant to send a message assuring such strident groups as the Traditional Values Coalition that she, as Education Secretary, would toe the "pro-family" line.

Spellings has been part of George W. Bush's inner circle since the 1980s when, as a school-board lobbyist in Texas, she earned the nickname "Princess of Darkness." While Bush was Governor of Texas, she helped formulate the "No Child Left Behind" program, an underfunded PR tool now being foisted on public education nationwide. As senior domestic policy advisor during Bush's first term, Spellings wielded power well beyond her range of purported expertise, dipping into matters such as health care and criminal justice.

While Spellings has no known history of participation in organized right-wing censorship efforts, the Postcards from Buster controversy arises in a climate where material acceptable on television five years ago is being proscribed. Ever-stiffening FCC "decency" fines are a constant threat. In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election and its concomitant myth of a "moral values" victory, gay content is being attacked with freshly energized zeal.

The assault on Postcards from Buster comes on the heels of a flap over a music video produced by songwriter Nile Rodgers. The video, a children's remake of the post-9/11 "We Are Family" all-star singalong, is scheduled to be shipped in March to 61,000 schools across the US. In this version, the song is sung by over 100 cartoon characters including SpongeBob SquarePants, Barney, and Arthur the Aadvark. Focus on the Family's James Dobson singled out SpongeBob, known to be a hit with gay viewers, for special obloquy as he railed against the inclusion of "sexual identity" in a tolerance pledge published at the We Are Family Foundation's website.

The Buster controversy also echoes a 1986 furor over The Africans: A Triple Heritage, a nine-part PBS series devised by Kenyan political scientist Ali Mazrui, a Marxist. Lynne Cheney, then Ronald Reagan's Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, branded the program an "anti-Western diatribe." Demanding removal of her agency's name from screen credits and publicity, she withdrew NEH funding for the series, and cautioned PBS to avoid ever airing such "propaganda" again. (The acclaimed series has never been repeated.) The lezzies of 2005 have simply supplanted the commies of 1986.

Constitutional free-expression guarantees would seem to apply first and foremost to expression backed by US government support. But in 1991 that illusion was eroded by the Supreme Court's ruling in Rust v. Sullivan, which imposed an abortion gag rule on federally funded family planning programs. Seven years later, the high court-- according to the perception of Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich-- "validated the right of the American people not to pay for art that offends their sensibilities" in its resolution of NEA v. Finley.

Nevertheless, free-speech advocacy organizations including the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the Freedom to Read Foundation unequivocally condemn the "Sugartime!" incident on constitutional grounds.

"Secretary Spellings has crossed a critical constitutional line," reads the NCAC-crafted letter of protest, noting that the First Amendment exists to protect unpopular speech. The statement also cites the Supreme Court's recognition that government cannot use its fiscal power to penalize viewpoints it disfavors, "or employ the power of the purse 'to have a coercive effect' calculated to drive 'certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace.'"

But these are niceties the Bush Administration routinely ignores. In her letter to PBS, Spellings pointedly mentioned that "two years ago the Senate Appropriations Committee raised questions about the accountability of funds appropriated for Ready-to-Learn programs." The statement was a lightly veiled warning to exercise self-censorship or else.

WGBH-TV, the Boston PBS affiliate that produces Postcards from Buster, announced its intention to air "Sugartime!" anyway, and has made it available to member stations upon request.