Gay penguins and parenting

Penguins are the newest combatant in the culture wars, said Elyas Bakhtiari in The Moderate Voice. A couple of gay penguins were ejected from their colony in a Chinese zoo, Polar Land, because zookeepers “(invoking the little-known Zoo Proposition 8)” wanted “to prevent them from stealing eggs and ruining the sanctity of hetero penguin marriage.” But “pro-gay-penguin-rights activists” protested, so their handlers gave them eggs from an inexperienced mother and they turned out to be the best parents in the colony.

Gay activists should be careful what they read into the drama at the zoo, said Don Surber in West Virginia's Daily Mail online. If the plight of the same-sex penguin pairs proves that being gay is natural, the fact that the rest of the colony didn't want them to take care of other birds' eggs "proves that being anti-gay is natural," too.

All this proves, said Caroline Graham in Britain’s Daily Mail, is that male penguins, gay or straight, are driven by an urge to be fathers, according to wildlife experts. And since the same-sex couples can’t produce eggs on their own, zoo officials merely wanted to separate them from the parents in the colony to avoid creating disturbances at hatching time.

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