"Many news consumers may vaguely recall being bored by SpongeBob-gate about a month ago. SpongeBob and other popular children's cartoon characters had been enlisted to appear in a tolerance-promoting educational video produced by a nonprofit formed after 9/11. The video was first targeted by the American Family Association, which seized upon a tolerance pledge on the nonprofit's website that encompassed sexual identity. The AFA denounced the project as a 'bait-and-switch' gambit to 'indoctrinate children to accept homosexuality.' The religious Right's objections hit the national press when The New York Times subsequently reported that James Dobson of Focus on the Family had told a Washington dinner for congressmen and Bush supporters that SpongeBob was being featured in a 'pro-homosexual video.'

Beyond the ridiculousness of attacking the politics of a cartoon character, civilians might be forgiven for wondering what the fuss was about. You may have even assumed that SpongeBob, a gentle-seeming soul, was tolerant of homosexuality all along, even if the topic hadn't come up explicitly.

The phenomenon of the dramatic news nonevent is a recurring one, though, and sometimes it appears close to home. This month, in the American Family Association's AFA Journal, and in an almost identical article published by its affiliate,

AgapePress, the group purports to have 'discovered' that Charlotte Patterson, a UVa psychology professor and a leading researcher of child development in samesex families, is herself a lesbian and is raising three children with her partner.

According to the reports, Joe Glover, the president and founder of the Family and Policy Network, a conservative religious group based near Lynchburg, came to his findings after he 'did some research of his own.' It's easy to be unimpressed by this feat of research, though, since it seems to have amounted to a fiveminute Internet search.

'I don't have a comment about this Family-whatever it is website,' Patterson told C-VILLE. 'Factually it is correct that I am a lesbian. This is public knowledge. I am openly lesbian. There's certainly no way he can be outing me because I am out.'

The AFA reports also inform readers that Patterson has advocated for legislation to advance gay rights and recognize same-sex marriages. 'Absolutely true,' Patterson says.

The principal point of the AFA reports--that Patterson's identity as a same-sex parent tautologically makes her research on the subject propaganda--is of course an old saw among anti-gay activists.

'We understand it would be difficult to make this argument about any other minority,' Patterson notes. 'It would be very difficult to say that AfricanAmericans would be not qualified to do research on African-American issues.'

But the principal rejoinder for Patterson, who has been publishing in the field for almost 15 years, is the academic gauntlet of peer-reviewed research. Patterson also points to a long list of mainstream health and professional organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, that have adopted positions in favor of gay and lesbian bian parents in view of preponderant research showing an absence of differentiation in developmental outcomes among children based on the sexual orientation of their parents.

Patterson also finds her most recent published work-a study in the journal Child Development at the end of last year-a particularly inapt occasion for criticism of authorial slant. Drawing on a large, independently collected, multi-period national database, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the study was insulated from sampling and other potential biases, Patterson said, making it more robust than much of the research that preceded it.

According to Dyana Mason, executive director of Equality Virginia, a gay rights advocacy group, salvos such as the one launched by Joe Glover are mainly designed to galvanize his constituent base.

'Their only tool to keep their troops in line in believing that we're somehow lessthan because we happen to be gay is to simply lie,' Mason says. 'They don't have any facts to use, or any credible facts that have been peer-reviewed and withstood the test of time.'" (Harry Terris, C-Ville Weekly, February 22, 2005)