"It's true," said Keitha, "she's the one who turned me."

The Concerned Women for America, fresh from promoting name-calling in school and warning parents against allowing their children to watch Buffy, have discovered the latest threat to heterosexuality:

Barbie. Via AmericaBlog:

The religious right is now attacking Barbie for promoting "gender confusion." According to the men at the Concerned Women for America, Barbie is urging kids to go bi:

"This is directed at children aged four to eight... that's a really young age to be directing something along the lines of bisexuality."

Yes, Barbie is making four year olds want to have sex with other four year olds of the same gender. And the Concerned Men would prefer that children have sex with four year olds of the opposite gender, I guess.

What's really going on here is that the religious right has been attacking Mattel for months, just like they went after Ford and Microsoft and Allstate and Kraft and every other major American company. This is just another way for them to attack Mattel and get Mattel to do something bigoted to make amends.

Unfortunately, Mattel has already done something bigoted. You'll recall that Girls, Inc. is a non-profit corporation that promotes

...high self-esteem among girls...supports birth control and freedom of choice [and] girls who are lesbian or bisexual

Naturally, the AFA called for a boycott of any companies that partnered in promoting this weird behaivor, which Mattel had through their American Girl line. Caving in to this pressure, Mattel cut their ties with Girls Inc. last month.

It would be nice to think they would learn from this latest attack that bigoted groups like the CWfA and the AFA are the very epitome of the expression: "You gives some people an inch, and they takes the whole blasted yardstick."

There should be no compromises in dealing with those groups because those groups are not interested in compromise. They are interested in "freedom for me, but not for thee" and denying human and civil rights that should be garaunteed to everyone.

Yes, it would be nice if they realized that Ford did, after all. But I'm still not holding my breath.