Parenting & Family Quote by Burt Ward

“I like to protect children” lands like a moral mic-drop, but Ward immediately undercuts the sanctimony with a pragmatic pivot: adults get to choose. That two-step is the whole performance. He opens with the safest possible virtue (who’s against protecting kids?) then quietly refuses the usual censorship escalator that turns “think of the children” into “ban the thing.” The phrasing is telling: “adult programming for mature adults” is almost comically redundant, a verbal seatbelt meant to reassure anxious listeners that he’s not endorsing chaos, just consent.

The subtext is less about content than about control. Ward is staking out a middle lane between permissiveness and panic, insisting that the solution is selective access rather than blanket suppression. “Selectively decide” sounds almost like a consumer-rights argument: the problem isn’t adult material existing; it’s adults being deprived of the ability to curate. He’s describing a media ecosystem where the real battleground is gating and context, not morality.

Coming from Burt Ward, forever tethered to the bright, camp innocence of 1960s Batman, the line carries extra cultural weight. He’s speaking as someone branded by a kid-friendly era of mass TV, now looking at a landscape of cable and streaming where “adult” is a category, a market, and a warning label. The quote works because it refuses easy tribalism: protect kids, respect adults, and don’t confuse parenting with policing.