What a gutless bunch of bastards PBS is these days:

This week, the new US secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, denounced PBS for spending public funds to tape an episode of a children’s program that features Pike, a lesbian, her partner, Gillian Pieper, and their 11-year-old daughter, Emma. The installment of “Postcards From Buster,” which is produced locally at WGBH-TV (Channel 2) and which had been scheduled to air March 23, was promptly dropped by PBS, which is refusing to distribute the footage to its 349 member stations.

“It makes me sick,” said Pike, a 42-year-old photographer in Hinesburg, Vt., who united with Pieper in a civil union in 2001. “I’m actually aghast at the hatred stemming from such an important person in our government. . . . Her first official act was to denounce my family, and to denounce PBS for putting on a program that shows my family as loving, moral, and committed.”

I’ve ranted before about the conservative aversion to seeing anything they don’t like, much less (gasp!) paying for anything they don’t like, but really I think out of all the annoying traits of the modern conservative, it’s the one that makes me the craziest.

These are real people, with real families and issues and ways of living, and they deserve to see their way of life depicted on our public broadcasting system just as much as the average nukular family does.

I want to work up a lot of righteous anger right now, and maybe it’s the hangover, but honestly, it’s just sad. Sad that some people are so insecure in their own ways of living and loving that they can’t spend an hour in the company of an imaginary rabbit telling them about some people somewhere to who do things another way.

A.