Gay: Everybody (In The Animal Kingdom) Is Doing It

A new study claims that while homosexual behavior among bonobos, dolphins, penguins, and fruit flies has been documented known for years, instances of same-sex courting, mounting, and/or parenting is actually “nearly universal” across the entire animal kingdom.

While many view homosexuality as a threat to a species’s survival, the authors actually claim it can be a necessary adaption to save the species:

[The authors] found that on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, almost a third of the Laysan albatross population is raised by pairs of two females because of the shortage of males. Through these ‘lesbian’ unions, Laysan albatross are flourishing. Their existence had been dwindling before the adaptation was noticed.

Other species form same-sex bonds for other reasons, they found. Dolphins have been known engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding while male-male pairings in locusts killed off the weaker males.

I always find these examples interesting and I, like I think many people, sometimes look to them for validation of the ‘naturalness’ of human homosexuality.

I do not think, however, that they’re going to change anyone’s mind about human homosexuality. There are haters who are always going to claim homosexuality is wrong no matter how many species it turns up in.

Plus, I think it always walks the dangerous line of anthropomorphizing these animals’ behavior and potentially reducing the human experience of being gay to instances single-sex mating among less developed species in the animal kingdom.

Lastly, do you really think the bible-bangers who are most rabidly anti-gay are suddenly going to start listening to science?

Source.