Breaking what is taboo for some, the Oslo Natural History Museum is currently showing an exhibition on homosexuality in the animal kingdom which organisers say is the first of its kind in the world.
"As homosexual people are often confronted with the argument that their way of living is against the principles of nature, we thought that ... as a scientific institution, we could at least show that this is not true," exhibition organiser Geir Soeli tells AFP.
"You can think whatever you want about homosexuals but you cannot use that argument because it is very natural, it's very common in the animal kingdom," Soeli adds.
From beetles to swans and creatures considered to have a more macho image, such as lions and sperm whales, homosexual behavior has been detected in 1,500 species.
First off, I want to applaud the Oslo Natural History Museum. It's nice to see scientists not cowering from controversy or tripping over themselves not to offend people's religious biases.
But my favorite part of this article is the last paragraph:
A Lutheran priest said he hoped the organisers would "burn in hell," and a Pentecostal priest lashed out at the exhibition saying tax payers' money used for it would have been better spent helping the animals correct "their perversions and deviances."
*snicker* And now I must quote from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.
In many ways, the treatment of animal homosexuality in the scientific discourse has largely paralleled the discussion of human homosexuality in society at large. Homosexuality in both animals and people has been considered, at various times, to be a pathological condition; a social aberration; an "immoral," "sinful," or "criminal" perversion; an artificial product of confinement or the unavailability of the opposite sex; a reversal or "inversion" of heterosexual "roles"; a "phase" that younger animals go through on the path to heterosexuality; an imperfect imitation of heterosexuality; an exceptional but unimportant activity; a useless and puzzling curiosity; and a functional behavior that "stimulates" or "contributes to" heterosexuality. In many other respects, however, the outright hostility toward animal homosexuality has transcended all historical trends. One need only look at the litany of derogatory terms, which have remained essentially constant from the late 1800s to the present day, used to describe this behavior: words such as strange, bizarre, perverse, aberrant, deviant, abnormal, anomalous, and unnatural have all been used routinely in "objective" scientific descriptions of the phenomenon and continue to be used (one of the most recent examples is from 1997). In addition, heterosexual behavior is constantly defined in numerous scientific accounts as "normal" in contrast to homosexual activity.
The entire history of ideas about, and attitudes toward, homosexuality is encapsulated in the title of zoological article (or book chapters) on the subject through the ages: "Sexual Perversion in Male Beetles" (1896), "Sexual Inversion in Animals" (1908), "Disturbances of the Sexual Sense [in Baboons]" (1922), "Pseudomale Behavior in a Female Bengalee [a domesticated finch]" (1957), "Aberrant Sexual Behavior in the South African Ostrich" (1972), "Abnormal Sexual Behavior of Confined Female Hemichienus auritus syriacus [Long-eared Hedgehogs]" (1981), "Pseudocopulation in Nature in a Unisexual Whiptail Lizard" (1991). The prize, though, surely has to go to W. J. Tennent, who in 1987 published an article entitled "A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera." In this unintentionally revealing report, the author describes the homosexual mating of Mazarine Blue butterflies in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The entomologist's behavioral observations, however, are prefaced with a lament: "It is a sad sign of our times that the National newspapers are all too often packed with the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offences committed by our fellow Homo sapiens; perhaps it is also a sign of the times that the entomological literature appears of late to be heading in a similar direction." Declining moral standards--in butterflies!? Remember, these are descriptions by scientists in respected scholarly publications of phenomena occurring in nature!
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