Christian conservative Gordon
Klingenschmitt, who served one term in the Colorado House of
Representatives as a Republican, has criticized a former Sesame
Street writer who described Bert and Ernie as a gay couple.
Mark Saltzman told LGBT blog Queerty
that he saw the characters as gay when he was writing them in the
1980s, adding that he modeled their traits after his own relationship
with his partner, Arnold Glassman.
“That's what I had in my life, a Bert
and Ernie relationship,” Saltzman
said. “How could it not permeate? The things that would tick
off Arnie would be the things that would tick off Bert. How could it
not?”
In a tweet, Sesame Workshop, the
nonprofit behind Sesame Street, said that Bert and Ernie were
puppets without a sexual orientation.
(Related: After
former writer says Bert and Ernie are gay, Sesame
Street
says they're puppets.)
During a recent episode of his Pray
in Jesus Name program, Klingenschmitt decried the
“homosexualization” of Bert and Ernie.
“Mark Saltzman, by projecting his
sexuality upon beloved childrens' puppets, he is actually trying to
recruit children into his perverse lifestyle so that he can
eventually recruit them to become what he is,” Klingenschmitt
said. “Homosexuals, because they don’t have their own
children, they have to recruit the children of heterosexual couples
in order to continue and propagate their own population of available
sex partners. They are perverting and recruiting children by making
these false allegations and that is a demonic spirit inside of you,
Mark Saltzman, who [is] targeting children for your own pleasure.”
Klingenschmitt, a vocal opponent of
LGBT rights, offered a prayer “against the sin of recruiting and
defiling” and asked God to protect children from “the
homosexualization of the liberal culture who wants to reach every
child possible for their own pleasure.”