Despite religious fundamentalists' insistence that sexual orientation is a choice—homosexuality being the "unnatural" option—various members of the animal kingdom go their merry gay way, giving the critics a big "vaffanculo," as Supreme Court Justice Scalia likes to say.

The Swedes are quite proud of a pair of male ducks—well, sheldrakes if you want to get personal. The Local reports—

In the middle of mating season, a couple of male ducks returned to a park in southern Sweden, for the third consecutive year, ignoring the siren calls of all the lady ducks around them.

Far from the torments of bird flu and temptations of the opposite sex, the two common shelducks appear only to have eyes for each other - in a sort of ducky gay marriage.

"We can state that they act exactly like a couple (composed) of a man and woman, the bigger one always defending the smaller duck," Lennarth Blomquist, in charge of bird management in the southern city of Malmö, told the TT news agency.

"Shelducks mate for life," he said, indicating that these two ducks have found in each other the love of their lives.

I like to think of them as Ozzie and Harry. Same-sex marriages definitely occur in nature, though critics are likely to maintain that this case only reflects what can happen in a permissive environment such as Sweden's.

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The gay fungus of Vancouver Island (10/17/05)