"Unnatural" acts in nature?

As is typical when I write in favor of gay rights, as I did last week in the wake of the latest Prop 8 development, my email inbox fills with hate mail from the homophobes.

This time, many of them had a common theme - that gay sex is "unnatural".

So I decided to respond to some of them with a question: Homosexual behavior has been observed in nearly 1,500 non-human animal species. So is it really unnatural even though it occurs in nature?

So far, I've gotten only one reply to that question - from someone who simply denied that homosexuality occurs in the animal kingdom.

He reminded me that the right-wing radicals never let facts or logic get in the way of their hysteria.