Sesame Street has one Spanish-speaking character already, a little lamb named Ovejita, who likes visiting school with Murray Monster. And a sharp-eyed friend noticed that the show is casting a second bilingual character who not only speaks Spanish, but is “comfortable with multiple Spanish dialects and accents.” Strategically, this is probably a smart step—if Sesame Street wants to fulfill its mission of providing quality early-education television to a growing audience, having characters who speak Spanish is a good way to expose children whose first language is English to a language it may be useful for them to know later, and it may give families whose first language is Spanish a door into a show that would otherwise seem unfamiliar. There’s been a lot of conversation lately about the fact that Hispanic and Latino viewers aren’t turning in to broadcast television, and it’s smart business and educational sense to try to meet the members of those audiences who are looking for some Spanish-language programming where they are in a way that matches Sesame Street‘s mission.

I’m also impressed that the call requests multiple Spanish dialects and accents. One of the things I think is most important in talking about diversity is the recognition that one black character can’t represent the entirety of the black experience, that “Latino” is not a monolithic thing, nor is “gay.” It’s very easy for culture to fall into a rut, where because we have dandy-ish gay male characters, or tough black male characters, or Sofia Vergara on Modern Family, the assumption is that we’re covered and we don’t have to look for new kinds of characters and new kinds of stories. If Sesame Street can help build the expectation in its young audience that diversity itself will be diverse, it’ll be doing the larger culture a favor along with teaching a little Spanish.

Fox News got all het up about the Muppets being anti-Capitalist before coming to their senses. So it seems strange that conservatives would follow up that loser of a battle by criticizing Sesame Street’s campaign against child hunger by arguing that it’s “Brought to you by the letters ‘B’ and ‘G’… for Big Government.”

This is, of course, a depressing reflection on the state of the current conservative movement. It was a Republican, Sen. Bob Dole, who worked with Sen. George McGovern to make it easier for families to get food stamps and to expand school lunch programs (his commitment may originally have come from his agricultural constituents, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t help people get food assistance). It might be nice to believe that private charity can totally alleviate hunger, but that seems like an optimistic assumption even in the best of times. It doesn’t seem like a tragedy of bureaucratic overreach to suggest that in case of emergency, the government should provide its most vulnerable citizens with access to the minimum essentials they need to be able to work, or study—or live.

And more to the point, do we really want to teach children the value of independence and hard work by suggesting that it’s dishonorable for them to accept food assistance if they aren’t getting fed at home? Not every child’s parents are going to be able to provide everything they need. Not every child’s parents will know what help is available to them if they’re having trouble affording food or clothing if their English language skills are poor or if they’re not terribly plugged in to existing bureaucracies. If we can reach vulnerable parents through their children, that strikes me as a good thing. And if children suffer not just form poverty but from neglectful parents and Sesame Street programming gives them the information and inspiration to advocate for themselves and get themselves access to the resources that have already been made available for them, I have a hard time shaking my head over that. When kids are at a point where their food supply is secure, then might be the time to get all Ron Swanson on them about the problems with government programs.

I was talking to my friend and Good Wife-recapper extraordinaire Kate last night about A Gifted Man, which I liked rather more than she did. She was arguing that the show’s solution to the health care crisis in the presence of Patrick Wilson as a Fancy Neurologist Who Decides to Serve the Poor is incremental rather than systematic, which I basically agree with. But I also think that the existence of a show that illustrates all the big and little things that makes it difficult to obtain health care is worthwhile. Laying out and emphasizing the full extent of a problem while providing emotional hooks for viewers is something pop culture can do well. Though of course, it’s important to lay out the problem in a way that supports the best possible solution. I agree with Kate that positing that clinic employees are clueless is a bad way to go, though it’s smart for A Gifted Man to emphasize that it’s nice to have health insurance, but you also have to have a place you can use it, the knowledge to seek out the right treatment, and the resources to maintain your health in other ways.

All of which is a long way of saying that I’m curious to see what Sesame Street will do with a new character it’s introducing: Lily, whose family is financially disadvantaged enough that they have trouble keeping food on the table. As much as very special episodes are annoying, this strikes me as a good idea. The prospect of not having enough to eat is really viscerally terrifying, especially if you’re young. But it’s important for kids (and adults as well) to understand how many Americans are hungry in what’s supposed to be a land of opportunity. More than 10 percent of Americans relied on food stamps for at least part of 2010. Trying to communicate the magnitude of that problem while spurring people to action (rather than scaring them so much they shut down) is a difficult task, but I hope this special can be an occasion for broader family conversations about poverty and the economy.

And I hope they manage to integrate Lily into episodes regularly. It would be unfortunate to trot her out and then shove her and her family’s financial situation out of the picture a la Glee‘s approach to Sam’s homelessness — that show didn’t just eliminate the plotline, it got rid of the whole character. There may be two Americas, but it’s not as if they’re on opposite sides of a wall. Teaching kids not to assume that everyone has the same level of resources is a valuable lesson in social awareness. So many signifiers of coolness — clothes, birthdays, activities, cars, housing — are really signifiers of wealth, and in a deep and prolonged recession, poverty makes you socially as well as materially vulnerable. And Sesame Street can demonstrate both that vulnerability and the hope for something better by sending Lily out into the world of the show and encouraging other characters to recognize that even if they themselves aren’t hungry, poverty still affects them through their friendships.

I realized that it might seem that I’ve been advocating a couple of contradictory positions this week: that Bert and Ernie shouldn’t get married because the Sesame Workshop has stated definitively that neither character is gay and they are not in a relationship, and also that J.J. Abrams is acting with cowardice in throwing up barriers to adding a gay character to the Stark Trek universe to complement the franchise’s racial diversity. There’s a complicated web of issues here, all of which deserve careful consideration and respect: the rights of artists to define their own creation; the powerful desire of minority groups to see their experiences represented and validated in the culture that’s important to them; and the role of popular culture in normalizing non-white, non-heterosexual experiences and imagining how the future will be different from the past.

I should say up front that I think the folks who create characters have a right to determine the basic facts around them and not to have them reversed. This is why the Star Wars Holocron makes sense both as business decision and as narrative device: it simultaneously protects George Lucas’s rights to determine the basic facts about Luke, Leia, Han, and company while opening up other space for people to experiment and produces a grand narrative that, though it differs stylistically, can be read as a whole without being confusing or contested. The Sesame Workshop has said that Bert and Ernie are not gay, and I don’t think, however much we wish it were true, we have the right to contest that definitive laying down of continuity. We can rage against the tide as much as we like with fan fiction, but as consumers, we have to accept the limitations of the universe that are laid down for us. That said, if a creator leaves room for a character to be shaded in and expresses no particular discomfort with additional detail, I’m comfortable with character expansion. George Lucas may have created a fighter pilot named Wedge Antilles, but for all we knew, he could have been the gay son of Corellian glitterstim smugglers. Lucas left it to Michael A. Stackpole to fill in Wedge’s history, to give him an attraction to strong, intelligent women and the lost dream of opening up a fueling station with his dad. If there are no objections from Gene Roddenberry’s family to filling in Hikaru Sulu’s — or another sexually undefined character’s* — background and fleshing them out as gay or bisexual, I think that’s fine and consistent with respect for artist-defined continuity.

If there were objections, of course, then I think they should be respected, however unprogressive I think those wishes are. But I do think if a universe is being rebooted, or expanded beyond its original conceptions, or if it has a tradition of adding new characters, then it is entirely appropriate for folks who want to see themselves and their experiences represented in those remakes or expansions to advocate for that. Archie Comics’ introduction of Kevin Keller has been handled beautifully in this regard. He was introduced in a way that was consistent with some of the core themes and storylines of the universe — as an object of rivalry between Betty and Veronica — but that added dimension to those old themes in a way that reflected not just the desire of Archie Comics to be more progressive but the actual lived experiences of teenagers today.

Julian Sanchez argues persuasively that the assertion that the Muppets don’t have sexual orientations# is an embarrassing dodge, and I agree. But it might be best to have two new characters who are introduced as a couple from the start and who are entirely no-nonsense about it. And if children are meant to model the Muppets’ behavior, it might also useful for the audience to see the Muppets treat an adult human gay couple (and perhaps their children) with love and affection as we’d hope they would in real life. Similarly, it makes sense for an Archie comics character date someone of the same sex, or deal with having a crush on someone who isn’t attracted to them, because those are the issues that the target readers are dealing with. In Star Trek, it’s less a matter of dealing with the specific characters’ relationships than it is establishing and reaffirming the values of the universe the audience is buying into. It makes sense to push for more diversity in art for the sake of realism and pulling new audiences and merely for its own sake, but if that representation can also accomplish strategic specific goals, so much the better.

*One weird thing to me in these conversations: does no one assume that the characters we see in heterosexual relationships could be bisexual? The persistent invisibility of bisexual in our culture, pop and otherwise, is fascinating.

#Another group of people who are invisible and our society and culture? Asexual folks.

Some folks have gotten together a petition on Change.org calling on Sesame Street to have Bert and Ernie get married or for the show to add a transgender character. I’m not sure I have an opinion on the latter, but I’m pretty firmly against the idea that New York’s two most famous roommates should tie the knot.

If Bert and Ernie were gay, I would be all for them bopping down to City Hall and getting hitched. But the characters aren’t gay. People may want them to be gay, but the Sesame Workshop has repeatedly denied that either character is homosexual and that they are a couple, and I’m pretty firmly in favor of creators’ rights to determine basic facts about their characters. We can debate the specifics of the characters’ portrayal, but if Sesame Street says the pair isn’t gay, it would be a bit odd to force them to get married because we want some role models. Archie Comics’ approach, adding and firmly establishing a new gay characters, makes much more sense than this kind of justice-oriented retcon.

And more to the point, I think it’s actively unhelpful to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple. Having close, affectionate friendships with another man doesn’t mean that you two are sleeping together, just as liking fashion doesn’t automatically flip a switch on your sexual orientation and make you only interested in dudes. Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way. As much as I write about how narrow depictions of women can be in pop culture, depictions of men may end up being more positive, but that doesn’t mean they’re less limiting.