Can Animals Be Gay?

Yes they can!

I find this passage in the New York Times article particularly interesting:

Two years ago, [biologist Lindsay] Young decided to write a short paper with two colleagues on the female-female albatross pairs. “We were pretty careful in the original article to plainly and simply report what we found,” she said. “It’s definitely a little bit of a tricky subject, and one you want to be gentle on.” But the journal that published the paper, Biology Letters, sent out a press release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalised gay marriage. At 6 the next morning, a Fox News reporter called Young on her cellphone. The resulting story joined others, including one in this paper, and as the news ricocheted around the Internet, a stampede of online commenters alternately celebrated Young’s findings as a clear call for equality or denigrated them as “pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest” and “an effort to humanise animals or devolve humans to the level of animals or to further an agenda.”

I hope somebody told the online commenters about how animals have been used by Thomas Aquinas and other prominent Christians to legitimise the homophobic agenda. When Thomas began to study animals he sought to confirm his theory about homosexuality being a sign of human sin. The idea was that animals are without sin and ethically superior to human beings. But when Thomas instead found that homosexuality is quite common amongst animals, he changed his mind and decided that animals where ethically inferior to human beings. That is how you make animal behaviour part of an agenda.

Update: John Corvino has written about this, too.