That’s right–I have undeniable proof! It was my daughter who aided me in this decade’s most remarkable discovery. A few days ago she brought to my house a rain-soaked but still readable copy of The Watchtower, a paper left in her hands by two of those zealous, unstoppable missionary teams that we all know so well, whom “neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor hail, nor dark of night shall stay.”

Now if you were a gay man or a mother of a toddler in 1999, you may remember being horror-struck when Jerry Falwell announced to the world in February that Tinky Winky, the large, purple, loveable Teletubby with the triangular antenna was gay. I remember that I went out immediately to Payless ShoeSource and purchased a pair of miniature Tinky Winkies to wear on my tennis shoes (but only after I had purchased the last full-size Tinky Winky on the shelf at Toys ‘R’ Us, all of the others having been previously purchased by my gay male friends). I couldn’t help myself. Thank God my children were already grown and not in any danger of becoming gay by playing with my Tinky Winky doll.

But I digress. Here is a word-for-word excerpt from an article entitled, “What Does the Purple Triangle Mean?” in The Watchtower (Feb. 15, 2006):

…In Germany under the Nazi regime, Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to heil Hitler, and they maintained neutrality on political and military issues. So the Nazis cruelly persecuted them, incarcerating some 12,000 Witnesses for varying lengths of time in prisons and concentration camps. About 2,000 of them died, hundreds being executed.

What did the purple triangle of their prison garb signify? “The various categories of prisoners in the [Nazi] camps carried special distinguishing marks,” explains the book, Anatomy of the SS State. “The uniform system of marking introduced before the war consisted in sewing a triangular piece of material on to each prisoner’s uniform, the colour depending on his category: for political prisoners, red; for Jehovah’s Witnesses, purple; for anti-socials*, black; for criminals, green; for homosexuals, pink; for emigrants, blue. In addition to the coloured triangle Jewish prisoners were made to wear a yellow triangle sewn on to the coloured tirangle in such a way as to from the hexagonal Star of David.”

“If its moral significance is widely remembered in time,” wrote Professor John K. Roth in his book Holocaust Politics, “the purple triangle can yet be a shield against disaster, a shield whose triangular points direct our attention and commitment toward the good that most deserves human respect.”…

So, did I worry when little Ole discovered my closet-dwelling Tinky Winky doll in 2002? Nah, not really. He had a macho Bob the Builder doll in his playpen to offset any perversions from Tinky. No worry at all now, though, with this breaking news from The Watchtower. It means Tinky Winky is not gay. He’s only a Jehovah’s Witness.

But about that Wendy, who works with Bob the Builder. She has quite a toolbelt…

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*The Watchtower article somehow failed to indicate that lesbians were among the “anti-socials” labeled by the Nazis with a black triangle. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Triangle.) I just felt compelled to tell you that.

Copyright 11/5/06, Juliana Harvard