Strange mix here, but I thought John McCain’s recent insistence that, despite being a parent of an adopted child, he doesn’t “believe in gay adoption” is a nice segway into this story about how homosexuality has been observed to appear naturally in over 1500 species. McCain presumably wouldn’t approve of Roy and Silo:
Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male.
Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak.
– David S. Cohen
Indeed, And Tango Makes Three, a children’s picture book written about the penguins and their “adopted” baby, has been regularly banned.
Two days after his original quote appeared in the Times, McCain has now re-stated his position as, like his position on same-sex marriage, one of federalism. He prefers that only heterosexuals adopt, but would leave it up to the states to let same-sex couples adopt. Because, well, they’re at least better than being abandoned.
Well, “And Tango Makes Three” hasn’t been banned, but it has topped the list of books most challenged in US libraries for two years running:
A children’s story about a family of penguins with two fathers once again tops the list of library books the American public objects to the most.
And Tango Makes Three, released in 2005 and co-written by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, was the most “challenged” book in U.S. public schools and libraries for the second straight year, according to the American Library Association.
“The complaints are that young children will believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle that is acceptable. The people complaining, of course, don’t agree with that,” Judith Krug, director of the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said …
http://www.thestar.com/article/422331
Woops, the final three paragraphs in that post are lifted from the article referred to and should be in quotes. Sorry.