Quick, someone call John Lithgow. This madness must be stopped! A policewoman character on the Australian soap opera Home and Away is about to find love with a female deck hand (is it safe, then, to assume they don’t have lumberjacks in Australia?) in a story line that will feature kissing and — I advise you not to read any further if you’re easily offended — dancing. On the count of three, let’s all shake our heads like we’re convinced the world is going to hell in a handbasket and say it together: Won’t anyone think of the children?

A group called Pro-Family Perspectives is doing just that; its director has been quoted as saying, “The plot lines that young kids and teenagers should be presented with should be about really authentic relationships that are not just sexualised.”

Whether that means they disapprove of homosexuality or they’re merely opposed to the idea of a lesbian relationship being used as a possible ratings stunt, I couldn’t tell you. In any event, there’s been little sign of widespread public outrage yet, maybe because parents have viewed their own teenagers’ MySpace pages and are smart enough to realize that their kids won’t be seeing anything on Home and Away that they haven’t already taken countless pictures of their drunken friends doing at parties.

UPDATE: Alas, the parental outrage, manufactured or real, did happen.