if animals are doing it, how unnatural is it really?

Modern conservatives only care about supporting their agenda, not reality. It only counts if it supports their pre-determined conclusion. See Schwarzenegger's "legislatures should decide on marriage, until the California legislature actually approves" statements.

Not sure exactly what you mean here, but there was a great science fiction story I read in an anthology once that featured a species whose extruding genetalia snapped off during intercourse and melded with the genitals of the accepting genetalia. They effectively switched genders during intercourse.

Boy, there's a reality where teaching abstinence as the primary birth control method in schools might actually work.

Apparently some conservatives have embraced March of the Penguins as a film espousing their values about monogamy and intelligent design (WTF?)

Does their version of the Intelligent Designer hate penguins? Because...dude. f I were designing a universe, I'd have been a lot nicer to them. Just for being so cute.

(Also, did they miss the part where the penguins are only monogamous for a single season at a time?)

Not sure exactly what you mean here, but there was a great science fiction story I read in an anthology once that featured a species whose extruding genetalia snapped off during intercourse and melded with the genitals of the accepting genetalia. They effectively switched genders during intercourse.

It wasn't Venus Plus X, but that's what your post made me think of.

(Also, did they miss the part where the penguins are only monogamous for a single season at a time?)

Much like Newt Gingrich, or Rush Limbaugh.

Also, did they miss the part where the penguins are only monogamous for a single season at a time?

Yep, this describes my conservative friends pretty well.

I think the local paper ran an op ed piece about the penguins last month. One was along the lines of "if these penguins were captive and had to do these things liberals and animal rights activists would be trying to stop it." I think he went on to bitch about something, mostly likely how the liberal agenda would kill penguins if they could.

Growing up I often heard about homosexuality being deviant because it wasn't found in nature. God didn't make any of his creations gay and so being gay is a choice to sin against God.

Now, of course, we find out that animals have all kinds of sex. Even gay necropheliac sex. (Although I assume these people don't know about the necropheliac duck sex, because if they did, all their heads would explode. )

So the same people are now saying "God made people better than animals and in His Own Image. And God isn't gay so people aren't gay and animals are just base creatures that do all kinds of disgusting things. And people are better than animals."

mostly likely how the liberal agenda would kill penguins if they could.

This made me laugh, for reasons which I can't explain.

You were probably just reminiscing about your penguin-murdering exploits. Good times.

Growing up I often heard about homosexuality being deviant because it wasn't found in nature.

One of my roommates sophomore year in college told me this. Of course, he also believed that he could identify a Jew by his/her smell.

Here's the relevant excerpts from the Will (a conservative, but not a neo-con) article in the Post:

This summer's movie stars are not the usual bipeds but other animals-- emperor penguins and grizzly bears. Their performances are pertinent to some ongoing arguments.

"March of the Penguins" raises this question: If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins? The movie documents the 70-mile march of thousands of Antarctic penguins from the sea to an icy breeding place barren of nutrition. These perhaps intelligently but certainly oddly designed birds march because they cannot fly. They cannot even march well, being most at home in the sea.

In temperatures of 80 below and lashed by 100 mph winds, the females take months to produce an egg while the males trek back to the sea to fatten up. Returning, the males are entrusted with keeping the eggs warm during foodless months while the females march back to the sea to fill their stomachs with nutriments they will share with the hatched chicks.

The penguins' hardiness is remarkable, as is the intricate choreography of the march, the breeding and the nurturing. But the movie, vigorously anthropomorphizing the birds, invites us to find all this inexplicably amazing, even heroic. But the penguins are made for that behavior in that place. What made them? Adaptive evolution. They have been "designed" for all that rigor -- meaning they have been shaped by adapting to many millennia of nature's harshness.

Of course, not having an ounce of feeling for anything but baseball left in his soul, he misses out on the childlike wonder that the natural world should inspire.

I've read that short story, Sean. It's in one of the Year's Best collections, from the middle nineties. I can't recall title or author.

All of my comment above was the impish idea of what Whileaway would look like on a movie screen. For one thing, how do you signify that it's not a chick flick, despite its (gasp!) having mostly female characters? For another, how many in the audience would understand the parody of the male astronauts? I think the best it could hope for would be a fate similar to the American version of Solaris -- noble failure, and an appearance on AMC within a year.