The upshot of marriage equality laid bare: the loveless union of two male penguins

Advocates for marriage equality in this country must hang their heads in shame. We blithely dismissed the concerns of traditional marriage exponents about where such changes to our social fabric might lead us. We were smug and complacent, and we cannot say we weren’t warned.

It must have been a bittersweet kind of vindication for Family First leader Lyle Shelton to put out a press release last week concerning where the rainbow Gestapo has dragged us: two male penguins “manipulated” into a loveless marriage.

Regular readers of Crikey Worm may remember the story of Sphen and Magic — a pair of male gentoo penguins at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium who strayed from God in 2018 when they started bowing to each other — a “gentoo way of saying they love each other”, the penguin department supervisor told the ABC — before building a nest and eventually incubating eggs together.

Sphen and Magic’s story is to be part of a new NSW syllabus about sexuality and consent, with keepers working with the Teachers Federation.

Is this a harmless and sweet way to illustrate that there are different ways to form a loving and committed family? Nope. According to Family First, it’s nothing short of animal cruelty:

When these two were given eggs to incubate together, this would have encouraged them to stay together for future breeding cycles and effectively stopped them from seeking out female partners.

Incidentally Family First is the party you go to if you need a voice in favour of conversion therapy, so it knows all about cruelty.

So essentially what should be a story about the damage caused by human interference in the animal kingdom is instead being served up to our youngest, most impressionable children as education on thriving gay relationships and diverse parenting arrangements … The next school excursion going to the Sydney Sea Life Aquarium is surely one to miss.

Shelton has such a glorious record in public life, doing whoever he’s supposed to represent proud by failing to prevent marriage equality, failing as its communications director to get a single Australian Conservative elected, failing to replace Fred Nile in the Christian Democrats, and failing to be elected as an independent in NSW in 2023.

But maybe the real failure was the friends he made along the way. Regardless, we suspect that this latest campaign — aimed, so far as we can tell, at breaking up a gay penguin couple — will not blot his copybook, so far pure and unblemished by success.