God Doesn't Hate Gay Humans, Gay Bottlenose Dolphins or Gay Penguins, God Hates Ignorance and Intolerance

As a preface to this post, let me begin by asserting that no religion can be true or correct that promotes lies as a fundamental part of their core beliefs.  That should be true about politics as well.

Roy and Silo,
and their chick Tango
(I have no idea which adult is which)

The news recently has carried some interesting related news stories about sexuality, ranging from anti-gay southern bigots to pairs of gay penguins becoming parents, both caring for unhatched eggs, and hatched young.
In China, a bonded pair of male penguins were given an extra chick to raise, after they had demonstrated for years a desire to be parents.  In Spain there is a famous bonded pair of male penguins raising an egg together.  In Toronto there has been a famous bonded pair of male penguins, and in the Central Park zoo, two famous penguins, Roy and Silo raised a chick, Tango, from an egg that could not be successfully incubated by its biological parents.  Penguins as a species sometimes engage in stealing another penguin pair's egg.  It happens among bird species other than penguins, as does the practice in some bird species of laying eggs in another bird's nest to be raised by other bird parents, called brood parasitism.  In some species egg incubation is shared, including penguins.  Among birds (and other species) there are long term monogamous social patterns, but there is also polygyny, and there is polyandry - multiple female partners for males, multiple male partners for females.  Occasionally there are bonded trios rather than pairs.  In some instances of same sex female pairs, one of the females will mate outside that bonded pair, and then the female bonded pair raise the offspring.
Add to that the potential for birds to engage in parthenogenesis, completely asexual reproduction (although relatively rare).  And other species which change gender, when there is an imbalance between the genders, to re-establish that balance.
Jane Goodall is promoting a new Disney movie about a baby chimpanzee, Oscar adopted by a single, not mated but presumably heterosexual Alpha male.  The internet is full of mother dogs nursing adoptive kittens, or mother cats nursing adopted baby squirrels ad infinitum.  Fostering some puppies from a large litter on a mother from a smaller litter is not uncommon among dog breeders.  In the United States, we tend to spend far more of our childhood being fed -- essentially nursed -- on cow's milk than on human breast milk.  The line is a very blurry one on what is 'natural' reproduction or rearing of offspring, or pair bonding and family.
What we know about nature is that there are many variations of behavior, including mated same sex pair bonds that engage in very similar mating affectional behaviors, and many variations in child rearing.  There are monogamous and non-monogamous pairs, but even those species like swans, geese and wolves which are believed to mate for life are not in fact always sexually faithful.  Monogamy in practice is not the only pattern for either bonded or mated pairs, or for family or sexuality, nor is heterosexuality.  there are species that are female only, like the whiptail lizard. Nature is diverse, nature is adaptive.  Nature allows for successful individual variation, to a far greater degree than many people think. 
Don't even get me started on what is 'natural' human sexuality.  What is clear is that this dolt doesn't have a clue about it.  What he believes to be 'sodomy', oral and anal sex, is simply human sexuality, not exclusively same sexual practice, which is consistent with the practice of those species closest to us in taxonomy, the species with which we share the greatest amount of DNA.  But the reality is that we share a lot more DNA in common with other species than the anti-science crowd / pro-creationist fundies are aware. 
If you want to really get into who and what we are, and what is natural -- we humans even have quite a bit in common with plants.  From the Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences:

INTRODUCTION Tracing Similarities And Differences In Our DNA 1 2 3 4 What percent of their genes match yours? Another human? 100% - All humans have the same genes, but some of these genes contain sequence differences that make each person unique. A chimpanzee? 98% - Chimpanzees are the closest living species to humans. A mouse? 92% - All mammals are quite similar genetically. A fruit fly? 44% - Studies of fruit flies have shown how shared genes govern the growth and structure of both insects and mammals. Yeast? 26% - Yeasts are single-celled organisms, but they have many housekeeping genes that are the same as the genes in humans, such as those that enable energy to be derived from the breakdown of sugars. A weed (thale cress)? 18% - Plants have many metabolic differences from humans. For example, they use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide gas to sugars. But they also have similarities in their housekeeping genes. Why Were Genes Used In This Comparison, and How Do They Relate To DNA? Genes are the fundamental units of DNA function. In DNA terms, genes are discrete sections of the DNA sequence that are part of much longer DNA molecules. They provide the biochemical instructions for producing all of the components of biological organisms. Some genes specify visible physical traits, while others govern metabolic processes. Most traits, such as the shape of your face, require the actions of many genes.

Also in the news was this nasty fool, this uniquely southern man of ignorance posing as a man of God.  No one should embrace this man's words as anything but a waste of air, and possibly as noise pollution.  But they do, and they are wrong.  Not just a little wrong, massively wrong, horrendously factually wrong, about human sexuality, about what is justice, about what is desirable in our society, and about what any deity could possibly want for those created by that deity.  This man is an embarrassment to his community, to his state, to our nation, and to the core concepts of religion.  He is a monument to the shame of ignorance, to false piety, to the most hateful and intolerant aspects of conformity and narrow mindedness.  This man has no clue what God wants or what is natural.  The truth is not in him; it has been driven out by hate and fear.

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Rev. Right Wing Wrong-a-ding-dong Worley isnt even preaching sound theology, which might go a long way to explaining why he has one of those small congregations of 100 people, like the not so Rev. Jones in Florida, or the Westboro wackos in the central U.S.  I am consistently irritated when people posing as clergy are less literate in the Bible than I am; there is NO definition of marriage as one man and one woman for example in the Bible. The Bible supports polygamy, with a man allowed more than one wife, even REQUIRED to take more than one wife, as in Levirate marriage where a man is required to marry his deceased brother's wife and get her pregnant.  The Bible also institutionalizes mistresses / concubines, and sex slavery, which is NOT monogamy.  Monogamy is a european idea that the ignorant try to justify with religious teachings where the text does not support it - and that kind of alteration of the message of the text is a religious no! no!, especially for the fundies!

It is a shame that a church with a similar name and farm more mainstream congregation of a few thousand people had to make that distinction clear.  That there were a few thousand protesters of the Rev. Worley illustrates how far out of the mainstream some of these fundamentalists are, who are consistently on the extreme right where this sort of view is not just tolerated but courted.  It would not surprise me if a poll of this congregation turned up a disproportionate number of brthers, and other fringies.. This is the core constituency of the free-dumbers.
Across history, across our geography world-wide, it has been normal and natural for individuals who are attracted to the same sex to be born in our human populations, in roughly similar proportions, consistently.  In other words, it is a normal part of our species, not an abnormality.

There is no inherent superiority conferred by one's sexual orientation to parenting.  There are some excellent gay and lesbian parents; there are some heterosexual individuals who are terrible at it, who show neither ability nor interest in it.  There are homes where a single parent does a wonderful job, and where two heterosexual parents in an unhappy monogamous marriage are utterly dysfunctional.  A perfect example of a same-sex couple, in this case two women raising a son, which is successful by every metric is Zach Wahls.

Heterosexual couples give birth to same-sexual, bi-sexual, oriented children; sometimes they give birth to children who have ambiguous gender, or for some reasons we don't yet fully understand are inconsistent in their psyche with their bodies.  We are still learning about ourselves, and about other species.  We are still learning about how these differences come about naturally, and why they exist. 

To suggest that we should put our same sexually oriented parents, children, sisters and brothers, family or friends, in the kind of barbaric and brutal isolation that this so-called minister promotes is no different than when Hitler first put Jews, Gypsies, political activists, and people with handicaps behind wire fences with armed guards.  It denies the truth of where we all come from, it denies the truth of who we all are and what we have in common.  It is the desire to put others behind wire fences that is unnatural and ungodly and inhuman.

The earliest discovered art pieces dating back 40,000 to 50,000 years ago; the existence of these art remnants represent a change in our ability as a species to form abstract concepts. A lot of it is sexual. Some academics are pushing that figure back further, positing both art and religion in the middle Paleolithic. There have been discoveries at the same sites which produce these stone age artifacts that also suggest that those ancient human beings cared for their young, their elderly, their injured and their handicapped family - both nuclear and extended family.  Their very bones show the compassion they demonstrated in life, and their care for one another, so very opposite and oppositional to what the sadly misguided man in the video above preaches as religion.

We like to think we are progressing; certainly our science is expanding our knowledge and understanding.  Some religious charlatans like the crazy-hateful Pastor Worley appear to be going backward, back to the early Paleolithic, before humans found religion, stone tools and art -- back before they understood, much less mastered their understanding of fire, pointy sticks, sex or human compassion.  Maybe Whorley needs to spend less time in his church, and instead to start taking trips to the nearest arts and science museums.  It might make him a more Godly man, a more humane man.  It might even raise the IQ of his congregation; we can only hope enlightenment is contagious - more contagious than ignorance, fear and hatred, which is always at its worst when promoted in the name of religion.