same sex animal pairs

I love shit like this. The bible babblers who espouse the natural and right behavior of heterosexual activity for the sole purpose of procreation cast their view of their community like a big steel net across the wide world.

Then I read an article from the NYT about same sex animal pairs.

"Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole."

and

"One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional."

Both quotes reference observed behavior by naturalists. The second provides some sort of 'natural' or 'functional' objective.

I cannot help but consider these studies in light of their significance as responses to a larger, nearly universal, ongoing debate about sexuality and civil rights. This science, as it gets filtered through the press, becomes an polyphonic utterance in that debate. It is a voice of many addressed to an audience that is fully aware of the contrarian's opinions and agenda. The reader cannot help but frame it this way not because the reader is well read or currently abreast on this topic but because that's how we view speech as it pertains to our lives. Communication is quite communal, and studies about porpoises penetrating fellow porpoises' blowholes smacks both of 'gay porn euphemism' and recognition that we categorize the world according to human concern. That same article, which extended for several ad-filled pages, mentioned this. The scientists involved in this work say that such categorizations, like presuming heterosexuality as an evolutionary default position, lead to biased science and research. I cannot agree more, but approaching animal sexual behavior naively won't make the science any less biased. The human outline is the measure of all things that we feel concerned enough to measure. Humanity 'gets props' in all that we say.