I don’t think I ever linked to this NPR report, now almost a month old, about the evidence for homosexual behaviour among penguins and how this behaviour just might prove embarrassing to all the right-wing pundits who have praised the surprise hit movie March of the Penguins for its alleged “family values”.
But I’m linking to it now because the perceived conservatism of these penguins continues to make the news — as evidenced, for example, by this editorial in last Sunday’s New York Times, which repeats the gay-penguin anecdote, and then concludes:
Perhaps, though, there is one decent reason for making moral comparisons across the animal kingdom: not to hold other creatures up, ridiculously, as paragons of goodness, but to let our tarnished selves off the hook. As awful as we are, our human burden of sinfulness and guilt has its advantages, as the poet Wislawa Szymborska pointed out in “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself”:
A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?
…
On this third planet of the sun,
among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One.
The Observer, meanwhile, also noted last Sunday that “America’s surprise film hit was meant to be a nature documentary. Now it’s a pawn in the war on evolutionary theory”. This leads to the usual put-downs of Intelligent Design, which is unfortunate, since ID is not entirely opposed to evolution (an 18th-century concept) or even Darwinian natural selection (a 19th-century concept), depending on which particular facets of those things one is talking about, and which particular ID advocate is doing the talking.
The problem with ID is that people on both sides talk about it as though it were a science, when in fact it is more of a philosophy or meta-science. (FWIW, my views on this subject are heavily influenced by Denis Lamoureux, who I once wrote about here.)
And I must confess that I had somehow missed, until now, the news that some churches were organizing March of the Penguins movie trips a la The Passion of the Christ, or that a “house churches network” — is that like home-schooling? — runs a “March of the Penguins Leadership Workshop“. Curiouser and curiouser.
The saddest thing about this, of course, is that it seems no one can release a basically non-political movie these days — be it March of the Penguins or The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Just Like Heaven — without someone trying to read some sort of political message into it, and/or then slamming it for that alleged message.
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