Quote of the Day: Fr George Rutler on the Moral Exploitation of Penguins

Another writer who is always delightful to read is Fr George Rutler. I suspect that he also gives excellent homilies. Here he is holding forth on the moral (or immoral) exploitation of penguins for ideological purposes (in this case, by the homosexualist movement):

While my contempt for the unfitting things that The New York Times prints is not effortlessly concealed, I was especially exercised by the way that declining journal has over the years used dolphins and other creatures, including the Chinstrap penguin, to promote an antinomian theory that unnatural sexual activity is okay.  Specifically, I allude to its article published on February 7, 2004 under the belabored title, “Love That Dare Not Squeak its Name.”  First of all, penguins do not “squeak.”  That is the sort of stereotyping that The New York Times general eschews, save in the instances of supply-side economists, black conservatives, and practicing Christians.  Penguins make various sounds: the African, Humboldt Galapagos and Magallanic penguins make a braying sound very much like donkeys, while the Yellow-eyed penguin trills, the King penguin sounds like a trumpet, and our immediate concern, the Chinstrap, has a shrill voice almost like a scream.  None of them, dear editors of The York Times, squeaks.  A simple trip to the Central Park Zoo would confirm this, and if those editors had made the trip, they would not have made their big mistake:  the announcement that some Chinstrap penguins are homosexual.

Polemicists exaggerate statistics as a matter of policy and The New York Times devotes its front page, “Style Section” and even obituaries to creating the illusion that there are far more, “non- heterosexuals,” than there really are.  Like the quest for the “gay gene” which, like the “missing link” is, as Chesterton pointed out, missing, a constant effort is afoot to find rampant unnatural activity in nature to justify it as a norm.  This is why “The Grey Lady” (or, “The Grey Person”) trumpeted like a King penguin a claim that two male Chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo, were attracted to each other. They claimed that Roy and Silo had been inseparable for nearly six years and rubbed their necks in “ecstatic behavior.” More than that, they eschewed female companionship...There was an added comment that Mr. Gramzay “never saw the pair complete a sex act, though the two did engage in mating rituals like entwining their necks and vocalizing to one another.”...

As members of the animal kingdom share with man to some degree the consequences of a fallen world, their behavior should not be taken as a model of prelapsarian perfection.  If, pace Cole Porter, even educated fleas do it, doing it a different way does not make it a right way. Even poor little lambs go astray.  Either accept that to go astray is not right, or you have to say that no one strays.  A few years ago in the San Diego zoo, an orangutan was upset by a woman’s hat and threw his own excrement at it.  This does not make him an arbiter of fashion, nor should dissolute penguins be cited as evidence in moral discourse.

Bonus for some continuity with yesterday's quote of the day (not a daily feature, incidentally) in that Fr Rutler also briefly bemoans the use of statistics to advance ideology. The whole column is worth reading, but I want to note a few things from the passage above. First, there is the assertion itself, summarized thus: if it is found in nature--in this case, if the beasts do it--then it is natural and thus normal and thus moral. Notice the string of assumptions here: that everything found in nature is natural, for one; that everything which is natural for the beasts to do is natural for men to do; that everything which comes naturally to men also is normal for men; and that anything which is normal is both moral and healthy.

This last point is questionable at best, as Fr Rutler notes: "As members of the animal kingdom share with man to some degree the consequences of a fallen world, their behavior should not be taken as a model of prelapsarian perfection."  So is the second assumption (anything which comes naturally for the beasts--or for a particular beast--is natural for men)--else we must justify anything from cannibalism, rape, and murder to spousal abuse and polygamy by noting that for some sets of animals, this is natural. Indeed, one of the comments on this post notes as much, stating tersely that "Ducks have forced copulation. Does that mean it's okay to rape people?" Elsewhere, we see similar questions [1] and comments [2].

As for the first assumption, it is reasonable to question just how common (or rare) a supposedly "natural" behavior must (or can) be. Several pairs of penguins in captivity have supposedly exhibited behaviors which are useful as propaganda for the homosexualist movement (though never before this last decade, apparently). But it was almost immediately after the first pair that this was trumpeted as "proof" that homosexuality is normal. Setting aside the question as to whether homosexuality itself is in fact natural, it is worth asking why a single pair of penguins living in an unnatural environment constitutes sufficient proof of anything's being "natural" let alone "normal," to say nothing of proof concerning "natural" and "normal" for men.

All things may be made clean in Christ, but not every means can be used to justify an ideology's ends. It doesn't stop them from trying.



---Footnotes---
[1] Question: "If I read the article correctly, it would appear all these "homosexual" penguins are found in captivity. Has this behavior been found to the same degree in the wild? Has this behavior been compared to humans "in captivity" - ie prison? Or am I just making a faulty generalization?"

[2] Comment: "Is it too obvious to point out that what is NOT observed among non-human animals is the very thing at the center of homosexual relationships - sodomy. The ridiculous homosexualizing of animal behavior withers under this fact."