February 11, 2021, 7:11 am
American Girl dolls are known for featuring characters with a wide variety of stories and backgrounds throughout history, for all types of kids to relate to and read about. Anyone who’s actually familiar with the company wasn’t surprised to see that they finally included an American Girl who had queer relatives—but just as predictably, the conservative anti-gay bigots are super mad about it.
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One Million Moms—the site run by one mom dedicated to trying to get anything that conservatives might find even slightly offensive canceled — is circulating a petition to get American Girl to “discontinue” a storyline in which 2021 Girl of the Year Kira Bailey has “two lesbian aunts.”
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“As Christians, we know that even though something is legalized doesn’t make it moral or right,” the complaint reads. “Why can’t the toy manufacturer let kids be kids instead of glamorizing a sinful lifestyle? American Girl is confusing our innocent children by attempting to normalize same-sex marriage.”
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The site also bemoans the fact that the book doesn’t “even include a warning” that Kira—like many kids throughout the United States—has LGBTQ family members, and chalks the whole thing up to American Girl taking a side in the “culture war” and “attempting to desensitize our youth.”
One day, perhaps the people who support One Million Moms will understand that if they don’t want to engage with a piece of media, they can simply choose not to, rather than trying to get it taken away from every person on the planet. But instead, they choose outrage and persistently failing attempts at control.
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And with American Girl, they seem doomed to fail again. Not only is Kira’s story already out in the world, but American Girl has doubled down on its commitment to showing a variety of ways of life through the characters it features.
“From the beginning, our ‘Girl of the Year’ characters have been designed to reflect girls’s lives today and the realities of the times,” spokesperson Julie Parks told Yahoo Life.
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“We know for girls who can directly relate to Kira’s circumstances (i.e. a father who has passed away or a couple in a same-sex marriage), we’re glad to show them that the make-up of one’s family doesn’t matter — it’s still a family and that’s all that counts.”
*First Published: February 11, 2021, 7:11 am
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