David Barton is a guy who makes a living lying about history…and now apparently he wants to add lying about science to his résumé. Here he argues that abortion and homosexuality are wrong because they are aberrations of nature.

The stupid burns white hot in that one.

It’s the naturalistic fallacy. You can’t derive what humans ought to do from what other animals do (and worse, what you imagine in your ignorance that other animals do). Other animals don’t worship the Bible or pray; therefore, it is wrong for humans to do so. At least, that’s the reasonable conclusion for Barton’s logic. We’ll also have to shed hats and shoes, stop cooking our food, and Barton will have to stop doing his clown act on TV…all human behaviors that are not shared with other animals.

It is simply not true that other animals don’t abort their young. Look at the Bruce effect; rodents will spontaneously terminate their pregnancies if exposed to a strange male. Lots of animals will spontaneously abort under stress, and it makes evolutionary sense: evolution, unlike fundamentalist Christians, favors the preservation of maternal life. It is wiser for a female to conserve her resources and bear offspring when she can afford the cost. You want real horror stories? Look up maternal infanticide. It’s a continuation of that same evolutionary logic: if infants cost resources, and if the choice has to be made between preserving the life of the infant vs. the life of the mother (and usually, death of the mother leads to death of the infant anyway), animals will sacrifice the young first. It’s been seen in rodents, penguins, pigs, foxes, tamarins, you name it. It’s often even accompanied by cannibalism. If Barton wants to draw moral lessons for humanity from the animal kingdom, there you go.