But what about the gay penguins? Ray and Silo at the Central Park Zoo in free-thinking Manhattan? They’re very much in love, billing and cooing and driving the female penguins into a frosty huff. They’re also raising a chick. What would Jesus do, Pat Robertson? Please Pat, as the official Mayor of Crazy Town, comment soon.

From today’s New York Times editorial page:

The news that emperor penguins are exemplars of self-sacrifice, marital fidelity and steadfast parenting has brought joy to many religious conservatives, who see the brave birds in the documentary March of the Penguins as little Christian beacons of family and faith…

It may be fun to find a moral lesson in that enthralling penguin movie, but anthropomorphism, like after-shave, is best used sparingly. After all, when The Times reported last week that Christian conservatives had embraced emperor penguins as their own, bloggers quickly recalled another article in this paper last year about gay chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo — a same-sex couple named Roy and Silo who raised a chick together. If emperor penguins are sending us a message about heterosexual marriage, then what are Roy and Silo doing?

Those who start looking outside the human family for old-fashioned values, in fact, will need to quickly narrow their search terms. They will surely want to ignore practices observed in animals like dolphins (gang rape), chimpanzees (exhibitionism), bonobo apes (group sex) and Warner Brothers cartoon rabbits (cross-dressing). Casting a wide net for chaste and saintly creatures, the mind flails, then comes up mostly empty. Yowling tomcats? Lazy, sexist lions? Preening peacocks? Better stick with the penguins. Or maybe Mom and Dad.

Perhaps, though, there is one decent reason for making moral comparisons across the animal kingdom: not to hold other creatures up, ridiculously, as paragons of goodness, but to let our tarnished selves off the hook …

Tha-tha-that’s all folks!