Ram-on-Ram

I don’t follow pro football closely — in fact, I follow it so not-closely that I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and take my bathroom breaks when play resumes. But even I know that this is the first Super Bowl involving two African-American coaches.

My older brother and I listened to the Chicago-New Orleans game as we were driving out of St. Louis Sunday afternoon, and one of the first things the radio announcer said when the game ended was that the Chicago coach, Lovie Smith, would be the first black coach to take a team to the Super Bowl.

I think the story line should be that Lovie Smith is the first person named “Lovie” who wasn’t laughed out of his profession. But that’s just me.

So, with thoughts of identity politics already percolating in my head, I read this in yesterday’s New York Times, about the scientist who had the misfortune of studying an obscure subject that somehow turned into a political football:

Dr. Roselli, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, has searched for the past five years for physiological factors that might explain why about 8 percent of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams instead of ewes. The goal, he says, is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sexual orientation in sheep. Other researchers might some day build on his findings to seek ways to determine which rams are likeliest to breed, he said.

But since last fall, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals started a campaign against the research, it has drawn a torrent of outrage from animal rights activists, gay advocates and ordinary citizens around the world — all of it based, Dr. Roselli and colleagues say, on a bizarre misinterpretation of what the work is about.

According to the Times story, written by John Schwartz, gay activists somehow got the impression Roselli was trying to find a way to end homosexuality in male sheep. (Funny coincidence department: Lovie Smith used to be defensive coordinator of the Rams. Get it? “Lovie”? “Defensive coordinator”? “Rams”? You can’t make this stuff up!)

And if you can keep the rams off their fellow rams, well, that’s just a short step from breeding homosexual orientation out of humans. It’s like Twilight of the Golds, only with sheep!

Except … that’s not what the research is about. Not even close:

Dr. Roselli, whose research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and is published in leading scientific journals, insists that he is as repulsed as his critics by the thought of sexual eugenics in humans. He said human sexuality was a complex phenomenon that could not be reduced to interactions of brain structure and hormones.

On blogs where attacks have appeared, the researchers point out that many of the accusations, like The Sunday Times‘s assertion that the scientists implant devices in the brains of the sheep, are simply false.

So where does that leave us? Well, I think it’s safe to say that rams will remain free to, as they say, “get wild and woolly” with other rams. And did you hear about the coaches in this year’s Super Bowl?

Tags: Tags: sex