Confirmed: Sir Elton John, left, and husband David Furnish.Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
Heaven forbid your seven-year-old, while waiting in line with you at the grocery store checkout, be exposed to the gays.
That seems to be the thinking behind Arkansas supermarket Harps's decision to put up a "Family Shield" -- a grey sheet -- in front of a cover of US Weekly which featured Elton John, his partner David Furnish and the couple's new baby boy Zachary.
According to The Daily What, after an image of the magazine stand circulated online, enough people protested to Harps and the shield was removed.
Of course, this isn't the first time someone has tried to protect children from homosexuality in literature (if US Weekly counts as literature).
Last year, when Archie and the gang welcomed a gay teen to Riverdale, some conservative types called for a boycott of the books and parents wrestled with whether they should let their children continue reading the series.
In 2009, when Scholastic released Love Ya Bunches, a book featuring a character with lesbian parents, groups organized letter-writing campaigns to get schools to stop carrying Scholastic book orders and to cancel their book fairs. They argued that the book -- and by extension, Scholastic -- was trying to "transform the views of impressionable children."
If your child grows up in a home with heterosexual parents, when do you think is the right time to talk to them about different sexual orientations? Do you leave it up to pop culture and their friends to fill in the blanks, for them to bring up the topic first or do you introduce it yourself?
Dakshana Bascaramurty