I hear the movie March of the Penguins has been a U.S. summer box-office hit. Has any of you seen it?
I also hear that American Christians are promoting it as the best thing that happened to the cinema after Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. The penguins are held up as models of monogamy, child-rearing, love and sacrifice, even as proof of Intelligent Design. Andrew Sullivan of The Times effectively shreds these notions in a rather funny piece.
According to The Auk, the scholarly journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, emperor penguins make Liz Taylor look like a lifetime monogamist. Their mate fidelity, year to year, is 15%. Each year, in other words, 85% of emperor penguins get a divorce and pick up a new spouse. Not only that, they’re not particularly p-p-p-picky.
“In emperor penguins the tendency to divorce occurred only when females returned earlier than their previous mates. Most emperor penguin pairs formed within 24 hours after the arrival of the males, which were outnumbered by females,” says The Auk. Memo to male emperor penguins: if you get to the breeding grounds a day late, forget about it. She’s already moved on.
It gets worse. Some penguins are — wait for it — gay. Of course, any fool could have told you that. They’re invariably impeccably turned out, in simple and elegant black tie with a very discrete splash of colour, and you can’t tell the boys from the girls. This is a big problem for zoos hoping for baby penguins. The keepers at Berlin’s Bremerhaven zoo were frustrated for years wondering why their penguin couples weren’t producing any eggs. After DNA testing they discovered that three of the five pairs had the avian equivalent of “civil partnerships”.
Gay marriage has apparently been around a lot longer than many of us believed. So they brought in four, er, birds from Sweden to try to wean the gay penguins into reproducing.
No word yet on progress. But German gay groups were outraged. How dare the zoo try to reprogram gays? “The central question is, are our penguins really gay or is it simply a lack of opportunity?” the zoo keeper told Der Spiegel. “The males have had the opportunity but haven’t done it.”
In New York’s Central Park zoo, a gay penguin marriage has even become literature. Roy and Silo were two male penguins who showed no interest in the females, appeared devoted to each other, built a nest together and at one point even found a pebble they decided to sit on.
Sadly, the pebble didn’t hatch. When keepers provided Roy and Silo with an egg abandoned by a heterosexual penguin couple, they became devoted daddies. Their adopted baby was called Tango. This summer a lovingly illustrated children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, hit the shelves, yet another weapon in the pro-gay culture war.
But nature isn’t pro-homosexual either, it turns out. In a piece of news that has rocked the American gay scene, Silo recently left Roy and is now with a female. “Her name is Scrappy,” Rob Gramzay, the zoo’s senior penguin keeper, told the Chicago Tribune last week. “They had an egg. It didn’t work out and they might try again.”
:balloon2:
