Science teacher suspended for article on study of homosexuality in animal kingdom.

Here is the article. There is a link to a Facebook page supporting him after first link.

<http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/the_gay_animal_kingdom.php>

Facebook support pages:

<http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=176187823374&ref=mf>

<http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=163432612279&ref=mf>

The teacher's name is Mr. DeLong. Please give him support.

Heck, I'd *want* my kids to read and dissect things like this in schools.

In an English class, seems to me that there are other materials readily available and more appropriate.

"Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males “effeminate.”"
"As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. "
"At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia."
"By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden’s theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution."

This isn't a Science article, it's clever writing *about* science that uses rhetoric to persuade, inflame, and even outright misinform, readers. Perhaps there are other science topics that would be more "appropriate", and have silly articles written about them that rabid fundy parents wouldn't freak out about?

Earth science? Oh, wait, that'd piss off the "6,000 year-old planet" people.
Genetics? Oh crap, the anti-evolutionists *and* the racists would be complaining.

I think you see where I'm going.... *Any* education in Science is under attack, so teaching children to dissect scientific articles would be attacked.

Also, it strikes me as quite brilliant to use an interest in sex as a form of teaching leverage... students would hardly ever read Shakespeare or Chaucer if they didn't know both author's works are filled with rather crass sex and excrement jokes. The parents complaining about this are likely the same folks who object to those authors.

From the article.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_gay_animal_kingdom/

He's an Honors English teacher, teaching 10th and 12th grade students.

*Yay!*