The most recent episode of “Doc McStuffins,” a cartoon about a six-year-old girl who repairs stuffed animals at a toy hospital, marked a cultural milestone. For the first time, a Disney Junior show featured a same-sex couple—and not everyone is happy about it.
In the past other Disney Channel shows have, however briefly, featured same-sex couples—but those programs typically skew towards a tween audience, while “Doc McStuffins” is unquestionably aimed at much younger children.
As with much children’s programming, the episode, titled “The Emergency Plan,” conveyed a specific lesson: how to behave in case of an earthquake. The two parents, voiced by Wanda Sykes and Portia de Rossi (two of our favorite out celebs!), struggle to reunite their family after a natural disaster. But there was a second, less overt message in the episode: normalizing the presence of lesbian parenthood—interracial lesbian parenthood.
Anti-LGBT organization One Million Moms caught wind of this and, naturally, quickly took to voicing their displeasure in a call to boycott Disney, writing: “Just because an issue may be legal or because some are choosing a lifestyle doesn’t make it morally correct. Disney should stick to entertaining and providing family-friendly programming instead of pushing an agenda.” They take issue with the show’s creator, Chris Nee, a lesbian mother herself, using the show to corrupt the impressionable youth.
One Million Moms claims to support family-friendly programming, but what they fail to understand is that only ever portraying heterosexuality on TV isn’t family-friendly—not to the thousands and thousands of gay parents watching, and not to the thousands and thousands of gay kids watching. For a show like “Doc McStuffins” to present an interracial lesbian couple as perfectly normal represents a huge push forward towards equality, and if One Million Moms doesn’t like it, then they don’t have to watch.
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