Can animals really be gay?

Last week, at the select committee on the same-sex marriage bill, a lawyer for the Christian Institute revealed that a teacher had been disciplined for refusing to read to her charges a book about gay penguins. It is par for the course to teach kids about adult stuff through animal tales. So it makes sense that an educational establishment that wants to imbue children with respect for gay lifestyles would foist gay animals upon them. But what is striking today is how seriously adults take, or are expected to take, the idea that penguins and all other beasts can be properly gay.

In February an academic at the University of East Anglia made waves when he upbraided David Attenborough for focusing too much on hetero humping in the animal kingdom and failing to feature gay animal sex. Many gay rights activists and gay-friendly scientists seem positively obsessed. The belief is that if they can photograph two male penguins fornicating, or document the life of lesbian dogs, then they might finally prove that homosexuality is natural and put an end to all those nasty moral condemnations of gay humans.

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Ed West

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How sad. How defensive. And how insulting. Do these anthropomorphic activists never stop to think how degrading it is to gay people that their lives and loving bonds are being compared with the instinctual shagging of puzzled birds and dogs?

The hunt for evidence of beastly homosexuality has become a serious intellectual pursuit in recent years. In America, scientists have overseen something called the Sheep Experiment Station, where basically — there’s no nice way to put this — a ram is put in a pen with two ewes in heat and two others rams while scientists watch to see which one it chooses as a mate.