Just in time to bolster the gay marriage movement in the US comes this report from the BBC about how two “gay” male Humboldt penguins in Germany incubated a fertilized egg and are rearing the offspring:

The zoo made headlines in 2005 over plans to “test” the sexual orientation of penguins with homosexual traits.

Three pairs of male penguins had been seen attempting to mate with each other and trying to hatch offspring from stones.

The zoo flew in four females in a bid to get the endangered birds to reproduce – but quickly abandoned the scheme after causing outrage among gay rights activists, who accused it of interfering in the animals’ behaviour.

The six “gay” penguins remain at the zoo, among them Z and Vielpunkt who are now rearing the chick together after being given the rejected egg.

“Z and Vielpunkt, both males, gladly accepted their ‘Easter gift’ and got straight down to raising it,” said a zoo statement.

“Since the chick arrived, they have been behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do. The two happy fathers spend their days attentively protecting, caring for and feeding their adopted offspring.”

This will undoubtedly incite all kinds of kerfuffles, but I for one am grateful that the egg and chick got proper care.  One quibble: the zoo said the following

“Homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals,”

“Sex and coupling up in our world do not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction.”

Au contraire: sex and coupling in our world have everything to do with reproduction, as do all adaptations.  We also have to remember that “gay” behavior in animals may have little to do with the phenomenon of homosexuality in humans. A while back I reviewed Joan Roughgarden’s attempt to analogize the two phenomena and, by so doing, to provide a natural “justification” for human homosexuality.  I claimed that homosexuality needed no such rationale, especially because if human and animal “gayness” are different, the justification vanishes.