Remember earlier this month when I speculated that maybe parents of teens and pre-teens in Australia wouldn’t act like fuckheads about the upcoming lesbian kissage on Home and Away? I was wrong. The Australian is now reporting that “Since the lesbian story-line began two weeks ago, 100,000 viewers have turned off and complaints have been flooding in,” prompting producers to edit the kiss, which was reportedly “no more intimate than any kiss shared by a heterosexual couple” on the show, to make it less explicit.

You’d think concerned parents in Australia would have bigger things to worry about than a simple TV lip-lock, but maybe that’s part of the problem—they’re too busy watching TV and bitching about ‘the gays’ to make sure their kids aren’t depressed or pregnant. (It’s almost like they think they’re Americans…)

UPDATED (04/01/09): For some reason it’s making headlines that the controversy-stirring kiss in question aired on Home and Away in Australia on Tuesday as planned. I’m not quite sure what all the hullabaloo is about, as you’ll recall that the original report never said the kiss was being scrapped altogether, just that “some of the more intimate close-up images of policewoman Charlie Buckton and deckhand Joey Collins sharing a passionate kiss” would be cut. That fits with what network honcho Bevan Lee had to say about the episode; from the Telegraph article linked to above: “Home and Away bosses had decided to air the first, more gentle kiss, without the ‘more lusty’ follow up because it fitted better with the storyline.”

In other words, this isn’t much of a victory, it’s exactly what we were told was going to happen back when this first made news, even if Lee maintains the decision to show a tamer kiss was merely “artistic” in nature.