A traditional puppet wedding

News flash: Krusty the clown and Peppermint Patty tie the knot in a traditional ceremony at an undisclosed location in Glenside, flanked by polar bear flower girl and elephant ring bearer.

What? It is traditional: Krusty is a male and Patty is a female. And my 8-year-old granddaughter may be the last generation for whom that kind of arrangement goes without saying. Or almost without saying. Indeed, as I played preacher for the proceedings, I suddenly marveled inwardly that she didn’t show a moment’s equivocation about the coupling of a boy and girl puppet, nor feel the need to offer perfunctory political correct disclaimers for her choice. (She could have, after all, married off the two same-sex bunny rabbits, and been more in vogue.)

My granddaughter seemed to know instinctively that it was the right thing to do to wed two persons of the opposite gender. But what will happen to instinct (that precariously flickering inner light of the image of God) once the school district, with its Trojan horse curriculum, gets to her with And Tango Makes Three, the heartwarming story of two gay penguins at the New York Central Park Zoo that’s elbowing its way into elementary school libraries from sea to shining sea? Will instinct go under for the third time beneath the tidal wave of indoctrination?

It feels like a subversive act, this stuffed animal play with my grandchild. And now that we know Big Brother is watching us through the windows and from the street corner cameras and our cell phone GPS, from the NSA to the IRS, it is tempting to draw the drapes before engaging in such activity.

Or maybe take the opposite tact, and refuse to go gently into that good night: Let us be like Daniel of the Bible, who when under suspicion and spied on by private investigators, kept the drapes open and continued to pray three times a day as was his custom.

It’s my grandson I worry about most. Why, he is a whole year and three months younger than my granddaughter—which is like a decade in time, at the present pace of the take-no-prisoners advance of the LGBTQIA juggernaut. Maybe his elder cousin will be able to set him straight, and tell him about the good old days when weddings were simpler affairs, and Krusty the clown wed Patty the ballerina and we still used the quaint words “husband” and “wife.”