"Unnatural" Nature, Immoral Butterflies: The Great Cover-Up of Animal Homosexuality

Back in 2000, an eminent and otherwise respectable biologist declared that except for a few instances observed among primates, there was no evidence of homosexuality among animals:

When animals have access to the opposite sex, homosexuality is virtually unknown in nature, with some rare exceptions among primates."

-G. Barlow, 2000

This was breathtakingly inaccurate. Just the previous year another biologist, Bruce Bagemihl,had published a book summarizing previously published scientific papers which described homosexual behaviour in over 300 species of animals and birds (listing dozens of papers for each), and also listing additional species of reptiles, amphibians, fish and even insects - over a thousand species in all, and tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles. The first recorded observations of animal homosexuality were two millenia ago, by the ancient Greeks. In modern times, the first formal publication of scientific observations go back over 150 years. Photographic evidence of male swan couples has existed since the mid-nineteenth century.

Even this illustration, of male beetles doing it, was published as long ago as 1896:

Male Scarab Beetles, 1896

Aquinas, "Nature" - and Sex.

Thomas Aquinas and Natural Law are often trotted out by the rule-book Catholics alongside the half-dozen clobber texts as a supposed justification for denying respect and equality to sexual minorities. I have absolutely no expertise in Thomist theology, but was intrigued by this observation, in a longer article ("The Other Side of the Catholic Tradition"), at the Washington Post.

Thomas Aquinas, who followed a century after Hildegard, wrote commentaries on 10 works by the greatest scientist of his day, Aristotle, even though the pope had forbidden Christians to study Aristotle. So controversial was Aquinas in his day that the king of France had to call out his troops to surround the convent where Aquinas lived to protect him from Christians aroused by fundamentalist clergy. For Aquinas, “revelation comes in two books—the Bible and Nature” and “a mistake about nature results in a mistake about God.” Aquinas insisted that one is always responsible to one’s conscience, more than to any other authority (emphasis added).

Study links empathy, self-esteem, and autonomy with increased sexual enjoyment

"Sexual pleasure among young adults (ages 18-26) is linked to healthy psychological and social development, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study is the first to use a representative population sample of heterosexuals to find a relationship between key developmental assets and sexual pleasure."

-Science Daily

Some Questions for Heterosexuals:

This Heterosexual Questionnaire has been around the net for a while, but remains pertinent. The formulation below comes  from socyberty:

Questions for Heterosexuals to answer:

1. What do you feel caused your heterosexuality?
2. When did you decide that you were a heterosexual?
3. Is it possible that your heterosexuality is caused by a fear of the same sex?
4. Could it be possible that your heterosexuality is a phase that you are going through?
5. Do your parents know that you are straight? How did they react?
6. Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Would it be possible to be heterosexual and not flaunt it?
7. Why do heterosexual place such an emphasis on sex?
8. Why do heterosexual feel compelled to seduce others into their lifestyle?
9. A large majority of child molesters are heterosexual, do you consider it save to expose children to heterosexual teachers in school and in youth groups like the boy scouts?
10. How can men and women know how to please each other when they are so anatomically different?
11. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?
12. Is it really safe for a woman to be heterosexual when there is such a higher rate of STDs and pregnancy among heterosexual women than lesbians?
13. Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?
14. Could you trust a heterosexual therapist to be objective? Don’t you feel that he/she might be inclined to influence you in the direction of his/her leanings?
15. Would you want your children to be heterosexual considering the problems that he/she would have to face?

Related articles

• Archbishop Vincent Nichols on Need to Keep Conversation of Sexual Ethics Open: Critical Reflections (bilgrimage.blogspot.com)
• The Problem of Heterosexuality. (queeringthechurch.wordpress.com)