You can just see the rim of Elton John’s black glasses, his bushy eyebrows behind them and a mop of excellently dyed strawberry blond hair. Beside him is the dark receding hairline of his partner David Furnish and behind them the masthead of the magazine Us Weekly.

And that’s all you’re allowed to see. The rest is obscured by a slap of grey plastic with the words: “Family shield. To protect young Harp shoppers.” That’s life in the small town of Mountain Home, in northern Arkansas. The manager of the Harps supermarket decided the image was offensive and applied the store’s censorship policy normally reserved for the likes of Playboy or other pornographic magazines.

What the cover shows, when the shield is removed, is John and Furnish grinning rather woodenly, fully clothed, as they hold their new surrogate son - Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John. “Elton’s baby! At home with Elton John, David Furnish and baby Zachary,” is the cover line, and it doesn’t get any more obscene than that.

The censorship was brought to the world’s attention by Jennifer Huddleston, a local shopper, who took a cell-phone photograph. Then she posted the picture on her Twitter feed with the words “This was taken at my local grocery store. I was shocked and horrified. Can you help bring attention to this?”

The tweet was passed around, first locally and then more widely, until it was picked up by gay and lesbian campaign groups and the media.

In later tweets, Huddleston made clear that she was an Arkansas patriot. “I love Arkansas. I hate to see this sort of thing happen here or anywhere,” she wrote.

For good measure, she also added the phone number of the Harps store, which was swamped with protest calls.

For once, this is a story with a happy ending. By this morning Harps headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, which runs 65 stores, had told the Mountain Home outlet to remove the shield and free John and Furnish from censorship.

The president issued a statement in which he announced that the shield had been removed and that said the company did not want to offend anybody.

Last April the courts in Arkansas struck down as unconstitutional a referendum of voters that banned adoptions by unmarried couples.

Still, it seems that a photograph of two adult men holding a baby is too outrageous for some people to tolerate.