Who Sue Voodoo?

As you may know, we've been working on a cartoony pirates-themed educational game to teach about science processes and food safety. After a long day of little progress, one of the ideas that came up during the design process was a segment where the player experiments with a voodoo doll to learn about baselines and independent and dependent variables. It seemed to fit the bill for what we were looking for - it hit all the educational objectives, and was fun to boot. Poking the doll with the pin and seeing how high you could make the hapless pirate jump was ripe with humor potential.

Unfortunately, it came up that there would be some people that would get their panties in a bunch that "voodoo" got mentioned. After some research, we heard from teachers that said that they'd opt to not use our product at all if it mentioned voodoo, even in such a pop-culture and obviously fictional way, because there is a certain parent element that would make the teachers' life hell if they heard about anything having to do, even remotely, with voodoo.

Now, it's not like we're planning on having voodoo houngans doing bloody chicken sacrifices or anything. Just the doll. Everyone knows about voodoo dolls, and they're quite often used in cartoons, comedy sketches, etc. as a humor device, in a way that frankly has nothing to do with the actual voodoo tradition. It's a concept that has been secularized into a gag prop, like a hand buzzer or a whoopee cushion. So it seems to me that anyone that is offended by this is being unreasonable.

Personally, I'm tempted to put it in anyway, and risk a few parents flipping their lids. At some point, they need to keep their unreasonable standards to themselves. If they go to such an extreme that they won't allow their children to even hear about a fictional object that has a word in its title that implies the existence of a religion out there other than Christianity, then the onus is on them to review all the media beforehand and pull their kids out of activities they disapprove of. If they can't be troubled to do that, then they should stay quiet so the rest of us who can deal with such a concept can enjoy the game.