Subject: Fundie Lie Exposed
From: exe00595 <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 1994 19:07:49 -0500 (EST)

Another Fundamentalist Lie Exposed
        In fighting against the University of Wisconsins proposed gay
studies program, fundamentalists have pressured Wisconsin State
Legislators into pen opposition. They erroneously claim that sexual
orientation is a matter of choosing a lifestyle. Those who support that
positon often claim that there is no homosexuality among animals other
than free-willed, choice-making man.
        The evidence of animal homosexuality in the literature, such as
Dr. Alfred Kinsey's film of two bulls engaging in anal intercourse to the
point of ejaculation, is ignored and covered up. The current issue of the
Magazine Science news publishes a report giving more new evidence that
homosexual behavior is a naturally occurring phenomenon among "dumb"
animals, and that it is genetic in nature:

        Gay rams lack hormonesensitivity

  In male sheep, a lack of docking sites in the brain for a specific
chemical messenger leads to homosexual tendencies. This finding
strengthens the idea that biological factors underlie behavior, says Anne
Perkins, an animal behaviorist at Carroll College in Helena, Mont.
  For breeding purposes, ranchers evaluate the sex drive of rams by
watching whether they try to mate with males or females and whether they
ejaculate. To understand why some males prefer other males, Perkins tested
the ponses of both male and female sheep to estrdiol, a type of estrogen
important to the development of sexual characteristics.
  She treated the sheep, then studied their brains a month later. In one
respect, all the rams responded alike, no matter what their sexual
leaning: The hormone did not cae a surge of luteinizing hormone, which is
impornt to female sexual response, Perkins reports. However, the
homosexual rams were more like females in that tpossessed far fewer
docking sites, or receptors, for estradiol in a part of the brai called
the amygdala than did other rams.
  In rodents, the differing responses of male and female amygdalas to
estradiol account for differences in courtship behavior between the two
sexes. Estradiol may play a similar role in sheep, says Perkns, by making
heterosexual males responsive to female odors. The omosexual males, in
contrast, respond more like emales and are aroused more by male odors.
"This may be one piece of the puzzle to help us understand sexual
orientation" she says.
  ----- SCIENCE NEWS, VOL. 145 MARCH 5, 1994.

        Thus the results of science. Too bad that fundamentalists and
legislators don't know what science is.