A useful round-up of hysterical far left responses to any legitimate discussion of intelligence and group differences. Far left activist Atrios calls me “a bigot or a fool” in his post. No, Mr Black. Just interested in the truth. He also says that my claim to have published an extract from the Bell Curve before anyone else is untrue. He’s wrong. TNR ran the only advance piece by Murray on the subject. And the cover-date for TNR is always a couple of weeks ahead of the actual published date (it keeps its shelf-life on news-stands), which may account for Atrios’ error. The magazine was certainly not alone in covering the controversy. But we pioneered it. I have the scars to show for it.
MORE ON PENGUINS: An emailer with another tale of gay parenting:
A good friend of mine worked on “Rock Island” at the Baltimore Zoo for several years after college. Rock Island is the home of the zoo’s colony of African (Black-footed) penguins. If memory serves, African penguins mate for life rather than seasonally — which included the for-life pair of Bob and Dave. Apparently some of the (heterosexual) mating pairs weren’t terribly adept at caring for their eggs or young, so when these particular pairs would produce an egg the zoo staff would snatch if from their nest, replace it with a fake, and put the real egg in Bob and Dave’s nest because they were very good at caring for an egg. My friend used to say that when Bob and Dave would come back to their nest and find an egg there they’d look at each other in a puzzled way as if to say, “Hmmm… one of us must’ve had an egg.” Then they’d go about the normal business of caring for it as though it were theirs.
That, of course, is roughly what many gay couples now do in human societies, when children, abandoned or mistreated by their heterosexual parents, manage to find foster or adopted homes with gay families. And that care for children is precisely what some on the religious right want to prevent. I don’t get it.
The Dish 