Confirmed: God is Slightly Gay

I am sitting
here right now smiling just a little, fondly recalling that famously
controversial children's book, the one about the gay penguins.

Remember? That positively adorable pair of them, at the Central
Park Zoo, who had adopted an abandoned egg and then hatched it
themselves and were raising the chick together as a couple, even though
the chick was clearly not theirs -- though of course how penguins can
actually tell whose kid is whose is still a question. Never mind that
now.

The best part: the story was absolutely true. The book, "And Tango Makes Three," was beautiful and sweet and touching in all the right ways -- except, of course, for the fact that it was also totally evil.

For indeed, the penguins in question, named Roy and Silo, were
both males. This meant they were clearly in some sort of ungodly,
aberrant homosexual relationship, mocking natural laws and defying
God's will that all creatures only cohabitate with the opposite sex and
buy microfiber sofas from Pottery Barn and eat their meals in silent
resentment and never have sex.

Worst of all, the book depicted this relationship, this
"family," as perfectly OK, as no big deal, as even (shudder) normal.
After all, Roy and Silo didn't seem to give much of a damn. Tango sure
seemed happy, what with not being left for dead and all. As of this
writing, the Central Park Zoo has yet to be swallowed into a gaping maw
of sinful doom. Any minute now, I suppose.

I am right now amused at this because it turns out Roy and Silo
were not really so much of an anomaly at all. Nor were they some sort
of unholy freakshow, an immoral mistake in the eyes of a wrathful
hetero God. Far from it. Turns out they were, in fact, far more the
norm than many humans, even to this day, want to let on.

Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research:
homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the
animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal,
commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons
ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to
pure pleasure, co-parenting, giddy screeching multiple monkey orgasm,
even love, and a few dozen other potential explanations science hasn't
quite figured out yet. Imagine.

Are you thinking, why sure, everyone knows about those
sex-crazed dolphins and those superslut bonobo monkeys and the few
other godless creatures like them, the sea turtles and the weird sheep
and such, creatures who obviously haven't read Leviticus. But that's
about it, right? Most animals are devoutly hetero and straight and damn
happy about it, right?

Wrong.

New research
is revealing so many creatures and species that exhibit
homosexual/bisexual behavior of some kind, scientists are now saying
there are actually very few, if any, species in existence that don't
exhibit it in some way. It's everywhere: Bison. Giraffes. Ducks.
Hyenas. Lions and lambs, lizards and dragonflies, polecats and
elephants. Hetero sex. Anal sex. Partner swapping. The works.

Let's flip that around. Here's the shocking new truism: In the wilds of nature, to not
have some level of homosexual/bisexual behavior in a given species is
turning out to be the exception, not the rule. Would you like to read
that statement again? Aloud? Through a megaphone? To the Mormon and
Catholic churches? And the rest of them, as well? Repeatedly?

Would you like to inform them that such behavior is definitely
not, as so many hard-line Christian literalists want to believe, some
sort of poison that snuck into God's perfect cake mix, nor is it all
due to some sort of toxic chemical that leeched into the animal's water
supply, suddenly causing all creatures to occasionally feel the urge
wear glitter and listen to techno and work on their abs?

And so we extend the idea just a little bit. Because if
homosexual/bisexual behavior is universal and by design, if gender
mutability is actually deeply woven into the very fabric of nature
itself, and if you understand that nature is merely another word for
God, well, you can only surmise that God is, to put it mildly, much
more than just a little bit gay. I mean, obviously.

But let's be fair. That's not exactly true. God is not really gay,
per se. God is more... pansexual. Omnisexual. Gender neutral. Gender
indeterminate. It would appear that God, this all-knowing and
all-creating and all-seeing divine energy that infuses and empowers all
things at all times everywhere, does not give a flying leather whip
about gender.

Or rather, She very much does, but not in the simpleminded,
hetero-only way 2,000 years of confused religious dogma would have us
all believe.

God's motto: Look, life is a wicked inscrutable orgy of love
and compassion and survival instinct, shot through with pain and
longing and death and suffering and far, far too many arguments about
who did or did not pay the goddamn mortgage.

Life on Earth is messy and bloody and constantly evolving and
transmuting and guess what? So is sexuality, and love, and connection,
and what it means to exist. And if you uptight, hairless bipeds don't
soon acknowledge this in a very profound way, well, it ain't the damn
penguins who will suffer for it. You feel me?

This, then, is what science appears to be trying to tell us,
has been telling us, over and over again: Nature abides no narrow,
simplistic interpretation of her ways. Nature will defy your childish
fears and laughable behavioral laws at nearly every turn. God does not
do shrill homophobia.

Of course, until very recently, science was also beaten with
the stick of right-wing fear for many, many years, told to keep quiet
about those damnable facts, or else. Homosexuality is a lifestyle! A
choice! And you can be lured into it! Seduced by the evil rainbow! Just
like those poor penguins! Right.

Let us be perfectly clear. Not every individual animal
necessarily displays homosexual traits. But in every sexually active
species on the planet, at least some of them do, for all sorts
of reasons, and it's common and obvious and as normal as a warm spring
rain falling on a pod of giddy bottlenose dolphins having group sex off
the coast of Fiji.

And either humankind is part of nature and the wanton animal
kingdom, a full participant in the messy inexplicable glories of the
flesh and spirit and gender play, or we are the aberrant
mistake, the ones who are lagging far behind the rest of the kingdom,
sad and lost in the eyes of a very, very fluid and increasingly
disappointed God.