Gay Seagullls?

A recent opinion article from World News references an NPR podcast about gay seagulls. No, that was not a typo. The article explains, “The episode, which recently re-aired after its 2023 debut, begins with the story of a seagull colony on an uninhabited island off the coast of Santa Barbara. In the late 1970s, researchers documented a strange phenomenon: Roughly one out of 10 nests on the island were inhabited by pairs of female seagulls. These gulls were “go[ing] through the motions of mating, lay[ing] sterile eggs, and defend[ing] their nests like other couples,” their report read.”

I found a NY Times article from November 23, 1977, that reported on this event. At the time, the Times reported,  “A university research team says that about 14 percent of the female seagulls on an island off the California coast are lesbians, calling it the first solid evidence of widespread homosexuality among wild birds.” Now going back to the podcast from NPR, the host is Lulu Miller, and she is a lesbian. I mention this because her whole point of talking about this discovery from 40 years ago was in hopes that it would show that homosexual relationships are natural. See, as you might have already known, a lot of times the argument against homosexuality has been made that it is not a natural relationship. That is not biologically sensible. You can not produce life this way, and so this is not how God has designed it. This leads to homosexuals always looking to find gay relationships in nature. They hope to show how relating in this manner is fully “natural”.

But unfortunately for Lulu, the seagulls were not gay as she would have hoped. The article continues, “After further study, researchers discovered there had been a crisis amid the male population of seagulls on Santa Barbara Island. They theorized that a chemical in the air or water was killing them off. For a brief period, that meant the female birds struggled to find a mate, prompting them to “playact” mating with each other. When the government regulated the harmful chemicals and the male seagull population rebounded, the “female-female pairings” disappeared.” To this day, you can not find the female-female pairings in this area of Santa Barbara.

But all of this means nothing. Once again, our post-modern age has missed the point. Stanley Hauerwas correctly said, “ From my perspective, 'postmodernism' merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.” And this is where Lulu is coming from. Everyone in the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup keeps reshaping and redefining standards and definitions as if there were no God. But there is a God. And He is the one we look to for the answers in our lives. It doesn’t matter if the seagulls were really gay or not. There was a more recent NY Times article that stated there have been as many as 450 animals observed engaging in homosexual actions. Even so, this does not matter. Because God does exist, and He is the one who defines for us what is right and wrong for humans to do in their relationships. And He states very clearly that homosexuality is wrong and thus a sin.

It is interesting to note, though, how hypocritical our post-modern age is. The standards are not just redefined, they are also only partially used. While Lulu and others are looking to animals to confirm their sexuality, they don't want to look to animals in other practices for some reason. Hamsters, polar bears, rabbits, and hippopotamuses have all been known to eat their young. Yet we do not hear our secularists suggesting we do the same. Apes have been known to pull the hair out of their head, causing great harm. But Lulu isn’t reporting how this is natural since nature is doing it, and so let's do likewise. The praying mantis is known for eating its spouse after mating. Are women parading around demanding the right to the same? Of course not. Just because something may be natural, that doesn’t make it natural for humans. But even beyond that, natural does not mean moral. We do not look to nature or what is natural to know if something is right or wrong. We look to God. He is our moral compass, not seagulls. He is the one who sets the standards, not Lulu Miller. In our nihilistic age, we are putting the creature over the creator. Just as God warned us we would do (see Romans 1:18-23). But it is even worse than that; we are looking for anything, even a bird, to justify our sin. This is the epitome of being foolish.