Covering 24 states, Buster has visited Hmong children as well as Mormons, Muslims and evangelical Christians. The series's mandate from the Department of Education - which provided $5 million in financial support for the show, 63 percent of its budget - is to highlight diversity. The episode, titled "Sugartime!," is one of 40 live-action episodes in which Buster, a cartoon character from the "Arthur" books and television series, visits real children around the country to show how they live. Pieper said.Įmma's family, including her other mother, Karen Pike, was filmed about a year ago for an episode of "Postcards" meant to show things like where maple sugar and cheese come from. "There are no positive role model images of families like ours anywhere in mainstream media," Ms. "We air programs that deal with gay lifestyles all the time on Alabama public television," he said, referring to recent programs like "The Congregation," a documentary in which a Methodist pastor revealed that she was gay.īut the lifestyles shown on such shows - or commercial fare like "Will & Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" - don't reflect the lives of Emma, her brothers and their parents, said one of her mothers, Gillian Pieper, who works for an insurance company. Pizzato emphasized that the issue for him was about children, not gays. If PBS sent a program down that said there was no Santa Claus, I wouldn't air that one either. "Parents can make the decision about when they want to talk about lesbian parents. "We don't want to violate the trust parents have with us," said Allan Pizzato, executive director of Alabama Public Television, explaining why he wouldn't have shown the program even if PBS had distributed it. The flap over "Buster" highlights what television schedules make apparent: while gays may be acceptable on television in the evening, children with same-sex parents are not very welcome in Mr. Since then, 39 stations have acquired the rights to the episode from WGBH-TV in Boston, which produced the series. PBS decided last week not to distribute the program to about 350 stations amid objections from various quarters, including a strongly worded disapproval from the new education secretary, Margaret Spellings. We are just the same except we have two moms." I don't think people should think of us as very different. That's just a stereotype and it's kind of hurtful. "I know some people don't like gays and lesbians because they think they are bad people. "I was pretty upset when the show was canceled, because I was very excited about it," Emma said in a telephone interview from her home in Vermont. But for Emma Riesner, 11, who was supposed to be a star of the now-controversial episode of "Postcards From Buster," what began as a participatory social studies lesson has become a harsh lesson in exclusionary politics. This article's missing a trivia section.For adults, the fuss over a PBS children's television show featuring an animated bunny - and real lesbian mothers - was nothing new. They help Buster find ways to resolve his and Arthur's problem. While in Winchester, Buster meets two kids who are best friends. Buster thinks it belongs to him and that he let Arthur borrow it. While on the phone with Arthur, Arthur says he found his Bionic Bunny issue #2 comic book. The new Bionic Bunny comic book is coming out.
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