Of course, this is a slippery slope to animal polygamy. Soon, we’ll start to hear about animals that don’t pair-bond at all, and mate with multiple partners!
And of course animal bestiality - animals having sex with animals!
Sweet. Sign me up for an Octokoala.
Soooo…it’s not appropriate for kids to read about creatures that love each other? Or does the book go into great detail about which penguin was pitchin’ and which one was catchin’? If not, how the hell is this a book about sexuality?
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See, Bambi is OK, because it never indicates that Bambi’s parents loved each other. (On the other hand, Bambi was being raised by a single mom. Bad for Family Values, that.)
People who would ban a book never seem to realize only a totalitarian state can do that effectively (and even those states can’t stop samizdat). Otherwise, it always backfires; if you protest a book you just give it more publicity and a wider readership than it would otherwise have enjoyed.
Wait, so does the book EVER mention any kind of sex whatsoever?
If not, then this is case in point for the religious right: they simply cannot imagine gay relationships outside of sodomy. Nothing else exists for them. They seem to think about it more than actual gay men, and that’s saying a lot!
I’ve read this book. More specifically, my 4 year old daughter picked it up from the New Book display on our weekly trip to the library. When we brought it home, I looked through it before we read it together, and found it was a book about 2 gay penguins. There’s really no other way to interpret it. Here’s a summary:
It’s a true story about 2 male penguins in the Central Park Zoo. Their names escape me at the moment.
They’re male penguins who don’t play with the females like the other males do. IIRC, they use the terms “boy penguin” and “girl penguin”.
The play with each other the way a boy and a girl would. Nothing anywhere near explicit, but it did make it clear that the other boys don’t play with each other the way these two do. They performed standard penguin courtship rituals with each other.
They built their own nest, and kept trying to hatch a rock.
The zookeepers gave them a fertilized egg which had rolled away from another nest. The two penguins took turns sitting on the egg, which hatched a female penguin the zookeepers named Tango.
The 2 males raised Tango the same way a mommy and daddy penguin would, they all loved each other very much, and they all lived happily ever after.
Very nice story. But you know what? My daughter wanted to read it right then, and I didn’t have the time or energy to go into non-traditional lifestyles with a 4 year old. And in fact, knowing my daughter, I don’t think it’s appropriate thing to do at her age anyway. So I made up my own story about a mommy and daddy penguin and their daughter penguin Tango.
So while I don’t see anything wrong with the book, I think there should be a little hint before page 7 to parents as to what the theme of the book is. And yes, in an ideal world, I would have read the book before my daughter even saw it. But when you’re trying to encourage reading in your children, and making the library a neat place to visit, turning down an obvious children’s book that your daughter is very excited about is counterproductive as well.
My theory is the right aren’t nearly so pissed about zee buttzecks (which after all is just a traditional instrument of male domination turned to decadent purposes) as the gay tendency to be activist, liberal, artsy-fartsy and piss-elegant.
Well it’s great that you all support penguin lust, but today’s topic is nun beating.
Not having kids, I don’t know; but how exactly do parents explain heterosexuality in way that’s unacceptable for explain homosexuality? It doesn’t strike me as that hard to say “Well, Skippy, love is when two people like each other a lot.” rather than “a man and a woman”?
The laughable thing is in this case is that the baby penguin is, to humanise it, adopted. “Two penguins in love adopted a baby”. Easy.
Good lord, man! I can’t support that!
Reminds me of a comment by Stephen King. When some school banned one of his books, he said something like “Thank you for ensuring that the kids will all buy my book.”
And you just know that soon they’ll be pushing for penguin marriage. Besides, penguins raised in a home with two males are socially maladapted. And they’ll get the snot beaten out of them by the other penguins. And they’ll always feel awkward when introducing their “parents” at school plays and/or choir and/or band concerts or when they take home their intended mate at Thanksgiving. And. . .and. . .aw screw it, I can’t get worked up over this nonsense.
Why would you have to “go into non-traditional lifestyles” at all? Why would you have to say anything at all about human homosexuals in order to tell the true story of the book instead of making up a bowdlerized version of your own?
Why couldn’t you just say “Two penguins wanted to hatch an egg, but they were both boy penguins so neither of them could lay an egg to hatch. So the zookeepers gave them an egg that rolled away from another nest, and they hatched it and out came little penguin chick Tango, and they all lived happily ever after”?
No need whatsoever to talk about “teh gay” with your 4-year-old. If American parents are so nervous about “non-traditional lifestyles” that they can’t even talk about two male penguins building a nest together without fearing that it will require a discussion of human homosexuality, American parents have some serious problems.
They’re animals, for pity’s sake, and they follow their animal instincts. They don’t have “lifestyles”. Their mating and breeding habits do not have to be explained to children by analogy with human social conventions.
I think that even talking about penguins being “in love” is kind of stupid anthropomorphizing. I know we like to pretend that critters are people, especially cute critters, but it’s not really mandatory and it’s not always a good idea.
Since we’re talking about gay penguins I believe its more appropriate to say that its a breakfast burrito and is filled with sausage.
I don’t have kids either, but when I was a kid (maybe 4 or 5) and asked my mom what “gay” meant, she told me: “It means a man who loves a man or a woman who loves a woman. Like my friend Bob. He has a boyfriend.” And that was that. Does it really have to be more complicated than that?
Might be worth noting that I grew up in San Francisco, so I soon realized that I actually knew* lots * of gay people, and they were largely perfectly ordinary. Definitely removed any of the possibility that I might grow up to think gay people were all creepy scary hedonists.
I posted about this book last year in this thread. I’m actually surprised it has taken so long to hear about any related bruhaha. Progress! :dubious: 
So did you read my whole post, or just jump to the part where I dared to modify the story to what I thought appropriate for the audience? The first part of the story quite clearly established that these 2 male penguins are different than the others, and behave towards each other the way that most other boy and girl penguins behave towards each other. It didn’t jump into Roy & Silo (I looked up the names) into wanting a chick of their own - it carefully established that Roy & Silo were behaving as a male & female couple would.
Do you have kids? They’re pesky critters. They make connections in their own minds and ask questions, which I, as a parent, feel obligated to answer. I can pretty much guarantee that my daughter would have done the anthropomorphosizing all by herself, and asked why 2 boy penguins want to live like a girl and a penguin do, and if there are boy people who do the same thing. Sure, I could have just sidestepped the issue and answered “Penguins do silly things like that,” or “It’s just a story, 2 boy penguins would never really want their own chick”, but I think it was better for her for now to avoid an issue she isn’t ready for.
Damn penguins, stealing our women. 
Once you go black and white, you never go back.