Ron DeSantis Blames Disney for Suddenly ‘Injecting Sexuality’ Into Cartoons as If Pepe Le Pew Doesn’t Exist

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis traveled to Nevada this week to stump for a Republican Senate candidate. Speaking at a Nevada bar, DeSantis rattled off all the culture war talking points he’s come to rest his entire political career on, including accusing Disney of trying to “inject sexuality” into “programming for very young kids.”

“And so my wife and I, you know we were thinking to ourselves, you know when we were young you could watch cartoons without having to worry,” DeSantis said. “Now, parents have to sit there and worry about, what are they trying to inject in? What type of ideology are they trying to pursue? And that is wrong.”

This is nonsense. Once again, we have a Republican demonstrating a total inability to see the mere existence of LGBTQ+ people as anything but inherently sexual. But romance (which is not the same as sex!) has always been a part of cartoons and children’s programming.

Take, for example, the conservative uproar over the news that there will be a same-sex kiss in the upcoming Toy Story spin-off Lightyear. People have been up in arms over this, insisting that in it’s inappropriate to have sex in kid’s movies and claiming, as DeSantis is, that this is something new. But if they’re going to view a kiss or romance in general as being too sexual for a Toy Story movie, then why haven’t they been saying that for the last 17 years?

Romance, love, crushes, attraction, and intimacy have always been a part of these stories. There is no reason to have a different reaction to seeing those things apply to LGBTQ+ characters except straight-up bigotry.

As for DeSantis’ claim that things were different, better, and safer, when he was a kid, that’s ridiculous. This man cannot handle a nonbinary character or a chaste kiss between two women popping up in a kid’s show or movie, but this is the kind of stuff he likely grew up on:

In response to the video of DeSantis’s speech, “Pepé Le Pew” was trending on Twitter Friday. That is a character who was so sexually enamored with a female cat that he repeatedly tried to force himself on her and that was the entire premise of every episode. Plus, when the character was cut from the recent Space Jam, a lot of these same people who can’t handle a simple same-sex kiss because they think it’s too sexual criticized Pepé’s removal as an example of “cancel culture” and “wokeness” run amok.

But sure Ron, it’s cartoons now that have the problem.

(image: James Gilbert/Getty Images, Warner Bros)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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