Advocates for marriage equality in this country must hang their heads in shame. We blithely dismissed the concerns of traditional marriage exponents about where such changes to our social fabric might lead us. We were smug and complacent, and we cannot say we weren’t warned.
It must have been a bittersweet kind of vindication for Family First leader Lyle Shelton to put out a press release last week concerning where the rainbow Gestapo has dragged us: two male penguins “manipulated” into a loveless marriage.
Regular readers of Crikey Worm may remember the story of Sphen and Magic — a pair of male gentoo penguins at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium who strayed from God in 2018 when they started bowing to each other — a “gentoo way of saying they love each other”, the penguin department supervisor told the ABC — before building a nest and eventually incubating eggs together.
Sphen and Magic’s story is to be part of a new NSW syllabus about sexuality and consent, with keepers working with the Teachers Federation.
Is this a harmless and sweet way to illustrate that there are different ways to form a loving and committed family? Nope. According to Family First, it’s nothing short of animal cruelty:
When these two were given eggs to incubate together, this would have encouraged them to stay together for future breeding cycles and effectively stopped them from seeking out female partners.
Incidentally Family First is the party you go to if you need a voice in favour of conversion therapy, so it knows all about cruelty.
So essentially what should be a story about the damage caused by human interference in the animal kingdom is instead being served up to our youngest, most impressionable children as education on thriving gay relationships and diverse parenting arrangements … The next school excursion going to the Sydney Sea Life Aquarium is surely one to miss.
Shelton has such a glorious record in public life, doing whoever he’s supposed to represent proud by failing to prevent marriage equality, failing as its communications director to get a single Australian Conservative elected, failing to replace Fred Nile in the Christian Democrats, and failing to be elected as an independent in NSW in 2023.
But maybe the real failure was the friends he made along the way. Regardless, we suspect that this latest campaign — aimed, so far as we can tell, at breaking up a gay penguin couple — will not blot his copybook, so far pure and unblemished by success.
The desperation of the religious Right is at times laughable, except when you remember that many of them would enforce their ‘laws’ at the point of a gun and be in some weird ecstatic union with God while shooting you.
Sydney Anglicans are in an alliance with C o E in Uganda, which literally endorsed executing gay people
I love Sphen and Magic. They are a beautiful capable and loving couple raising their chick. Leave them alone Lyle, it really is none of your business.
Life imitating art – this is straight out of the “Pawnee Zoo” episode of Parks and Recreation
which was inspired by Central Park penguins
I didn’t know that, thanks.
I just read up on the Central Park penguins, and the original story is even crazier that the TV story! Humans are mad.
Indeed. Honestly, the “animal kingdom” Lyle refers to is actually much more diverse than he could even imagine, let alone accept.
I’m running Gentoo Linux on this computer. Should I be worried about my operating system being “manipulated” by gender theologians?
Maybe I should choose another OS entirely… Tux might be influenced by the Gentoo pair into an unspeakable union with Windows.
Animals kept confined in unnatural conditions are prone to all sorts of new behaviours.
It was the Battle of Monkey Hill at London Zoo which caused herpetologist Desmond Morris to write his hugely popular, and even more wrong headed, straw Naked Ape and launched his subsequent lucrative career as a populist pundit.
In a herd of cows with no access to a bull when one approaches oestrus it will attempt to mount other cows but once it is in oestrus it will stand for other cows thus impelled to mount it.
A spayed dog will attempt to mount her owner’s leg when she is nearing menstruating.
Perhaps Lyle would enjoy Happy Feet?
This is a 2nd attempt because the madBot could not cope with the normal word for a female canine.
I have to say this is exactly analagous to how I view human behaviour in our current warped environment. I’m completely skeptical of any novel social phenomenon that emerges out of the contemporary human reality as our social conditions are so far divorced from what we were evolved to deal with.
The Rat Utopia (aka Mouse City) experiments at the NIMH by John Calhoun in 1962 were a good example of the baleful effects of the behavioural sink.
“Many females were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption.”
Sounds eerily familiar – references abound so I’ll not upset the madBot by giving a link.
There’s a lot of research showing animal homosexual behaviour in the wild.
Indeed. Some will never accept that.