(LifeSiteNews) — Fr. Thomas J. Reese, an American Catholic Jesuit priest, senior analyst at Religion News Service (RNS), and former columnist at the National Catholic Reporter, tweeted out a link on January 30: “Catholic bishops, take note,” he wrote. “Male penguin pair, New York zoo’s first same-sex foster parents, doing ‘great job’ raising baby chick.”
The link was to an article from the Washington Post about two male penguins raising a penguin chick. Presumably, Reese was making the point that Catholic bishops who oppose children being raised by two men or two women rather than a mother and a father are mistaken in their view of the biblically-ordained natural family because … because people are the same as penguins? Or penguins in captivity are a microcosm of post-sexual revolution America? Or that people must begin deriving their views on family from wildlife?
To be fair to Reese, who appears not to know what he’s talking about, he drew the precise conclusion the Rosamond Gifford Zoo was hoping. From the Post:
Elmer and Lima, two male penguins from the zoo’s colony of 28 birds, were given the egg to incubate and look after by officials who were concerned that breeding pairs at the zoo had “a history of inadvertently breaking their fertilized eggs,” according to a statement released Friday.
The zoo said staff gave the egg to the male penguins in a bid to boost the chances of the egg eventually hatching. The two were “exemplary in every aspect of egg care,” the zoo said, adding that the males took turns protecting the egg before it hatched …
The males have been tending to the chick by feeding it and keeping it warm — actions that the zoo said highlight that “non-traditional families do a wonderful job of child-rearing.”
“Elmer and Lima’s success is one more story that our zoo can share to help people of all ages and backgrounds relate to animals,” Fox said. And while Elmer and Lima’s same-sex fostering journey is a first for the Rosamond Gifford Zoo, other institutions around the world have also reported positive results with same-sex pairs fostering eggs.
Both the zoo and the Post are hilariously attempting to mainstream the idea of motherless families or fatherless families by anthropomorphizing penguins, calling them a “non-traditional family” and referring to a “same-sex fostering journey.”
LGBT activists and their swarms of supporters on Twitter promptly tweeted the article out with sarcastic comments mocking the idea that supporters of the natural family say that a mother and a father are … natural. If two penguins can have a “same-sex fostering journey,” they noted, then who is to say that people shouldn’t?
There really are many layers of stupidity here, starting with the fact that it is a bit of stretch to claim that a zoo giving an egg to penguins to take care of is a “natural” situation. In fact, it would seem to indicate that only in a very unnatural situation would this actually occur, for obvious reasons.
This despite the fact that the Post also stated that “two female gentoo penguins became first-time moms,” when obviously one of these penguins is the mother, and the father penguin is elsewhere. This is clear to anyone who has completed basic biology, but ideology has done a real number on the sciences these days, so perhaps the author of this column, the priest who tweeted it out, and the others drawing weird conclusions from this conservation project are simply unaware of this.
The first tweet beneath Reese’s article summed it up perfectly. Michael Hettrick tweeted an article from CNN with the comment: “Catholic Bishops, take note: A lioness ate her newborn cubs three days after giving birth at a German zoo.”
Catholic Bishops, take note: A lioness ate her newborn cubs three days after giving birth at a German zoo.https://t.co/gKVe2L09O3
— Michael Hettrick (@HettrickMichael) January 31, 2022
Perhaps Reese can take a gander at natural law before he attempts to lobby the Catholic hierarchy for changes to the theology of family on the basis of a penguin pair and ideologically-motivated zoo officials. It might prevent him from embarrassing himself on social media.
