The religious right, having ruined nobody’s Christmas but their own by complaining about how everybody is ruining Christmas, is not content to fade away now that the holidays are over.

Via Americablog, we learn their next target (and no, it’s not Target).  It’s Barbie.

Yup.  The Concerned Women For America are all upset because Barbie, the Mattel doll, promotes "gender confusion":

The iconic Barbie Doll has become another tool for promoting gender confusion among children. On the Barbie Web site, www.Barbie.com, there is a poll that asks children their age and sex. The age choices are 4-8, but as Bob Knight, Director of CWA’s Culture & Family Institute, notes children are given three options for their choice of gender.

"Bob Knight"?  Hmmmm.

Okay.  So I went to www.barbie.com (which doesn’t exist, really) and I couldn’t find the poll they were talking about.   But someone else did the leg work, and found it.

Okay, so you go to the Barbie web site, and the first thing you notice is that the actual URL is barbie.everythinggirl.com; the next thing you see is that the page is titled "Activities and Games for Girls Online!", and the next thing you notice is a banner saying, "Hi, Barbie Girl!" Not to mention horses, hearts, kittens, and of course Hillary Duff. Not to mention, you know, Barbie.

No, not a lot of gender confusion there. All pretty traditional girl stuff, if you ask me. Of course, if boys want to cruise around the page, hey, why not. I know that when I was 4 to 8, I would have thought it all sucked, but to each his own.

Now, the offending part took me forever to find — the Barbie web site is not exactly designed for efficiency — but eventually I got there. If you go to this part of the web site, there’s a fairly standard marketing poll. It asks how old you are (yup, ages 4-8), what you like to do in January (snowboarding, wearing "way-cool winter clothes", etc.), and what gender you are. The default choice is "I am a girl" (duh), so odds are about 99% that most of the takers of the poll will just leave it as it is. However, there’s a drop-down menu that also has the choices "I am a boy" and "I don’t know."

That’s it.

I’m not sure why "I don’t know" is there; it might be just a programming mistake, or it might be a reflection of the fact that, yeah, sometimes really young kids might not have thought about it too much yet, but this mostly invisible drop-down item in an obscure section of a web page is not evidence of anything. It’s certainly not a promotion of anything, other than, well, Barbie.

And yet, if you listen to this thing, the CWA honestly think that this is some nefarious plot to indoctrinate 4-year-old girls into homosexuality and transsexual surgery. Yes, that’s what they really think.

They’re nuts.

Here’s what I think.  I think if the Concerned Women for America are concerned about "gender confusion", their spokesperson should be a concerned woman, not the aforementioned Bob Knight.