‘The Simpsons’ Predicted Our Stupidity Again As Florida Decides That Michelangelo’s David is Pornography

Someone set the “Days without a stupid Simpsons joke becoming a stupid reality” counter back to zero.

In the midst of the great state of Florida’s ever-accelerating war on adequate education, the principal of a Tallahassee charter school was forced to resign after outraged parents protested their children’s exposure to pornography in an art class. The sinful smut that’s turning Tallahassee tweens into sex-crazed masturbation monsters would certainly fall under the “vintage” category of most online porn purveyors – the controversy is over an image of Michelangelo’s masterpiece sculpture David and his bare, marble manhood. 

If the branding of an iconic masterwork of Renaissance art as jerkoff material for twelve-year-olds sounds like a dumb joke, that’s because, like too many of the dumbest news stories of the last decade, The Simpsons did it thirty years ago.

In the Simpsons Season Two episode titled “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” the Simpsons’ blue-haired matriarch started an activist group called SNUH (Springfieldians for Nonviolence, Understanding, and Helping) to protest the barbaric content in Bart and Lisa’s favorite Tom & Jerry knockoff. 

Meanwhile, the aforementioned masterpiece sculpture is in the midst of an American tour that is slated to make a stop in Springfield, which the rest of SNUH intends to stop for the same reasons that parents in Florida fired their principal. Marge, realizing the double-edged implications of artistic censorship, admits her own hypocrisy and stops her war on “Itchy & Scratchy.”

The Simpsons managed to make a point on artistic expression in under thirty minutes that some Floridians couldn’t figure out in the thirty years since the episode aired. Mark my words, they’re coming for the burlesque house next.