‘Can’t Kids Just Be Kids?’ Italian Party Urges Broadcaster not to Screen Peppa Pig’s Lesbian Couple

Federico Mollicone, culture spokesman for the right-wing Italian party Brothers of Italy, has called on the state-run broadcaster Rai not to air a Peppa Pig episode, which features a same-sex couple.

“We cannot accept gender indoctrination. Once again the politically correct has struck, at the expense of our children. Can’t children just be children? We ask Rai, which buys the rights to the Peppa Pig [cartoon] series in Italy with a fee from all Italians, not to broadcast the episode in question on any channel or web platform,” Mollicone said.

The remarks followed the series for the first time showing a same-sex couple - two lesbian polar bears - on Channel 5 in the United Kingdom on Tuesday.

“I live with my mummy and my other mummy,” Penny the Polar Bear says in the episode, titled “Families.” She adds that one of her moms is a doctor, while another “cooks spaghetti.”

It remains unclear when the episode will be shown in Italy, where Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni is tipped to become the next prime minister; the country’s general election is slated for September 25th.

In 2021, Meloni’s party prevented an anti-homophobia law, drafted by the gay politician Alessandro Zan of Italy’s Democratic Party, from being passed in parliament at the time.

Zan, for his part, tweeted back then that “Brothers of Italy raises the alarm, a new enemy is besieging the nation: Peppa Pig.”

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This came after a petition was first circulated in 2019 calling on Peppa Pig producers to feature same-sex parents.

“Children watching Peppa Pig are at an impressionable age. Excluding same-sex families will teach them that only families with either a single parent or two parents of different sexes are normal,” the authors of the petition wrote.

The request has garnered nearly 25,000 signatures over the past several years.

Created by the British animators Mark Baker and Neville Astley, the Peppa Pig cartoon show first aired on May 21, 2004. The show, once touted as a “global phenomenon", centers on a 4-year-old female piglet and her family, as well as her peers portrayed as other animals. The show has been translated into 40 languages and broadcast in over 180 countries and territories.