HUNTSVILLE, AL—A coalition of Baptist clergymen spoke out Monday against the Telia felina, a transgendered sea anemone they are decrying as "base and depraved."

The dually gendered <I>Telia felina</I> sea anemone, which Baptist leaders are denouncing as "base and depraved."


"This filthy anemone, which exhibits both male and female characteristics, is turning our oceans' intertidal zones into dens of sin and perversion," said Rev. William Chester, spokesman for the Save Our Seas Coalition, a Huntsville-based activist group dedicated to "the preservation of aquatic decency and morality." "For God knows how long, this twisted sea creature has been running rampant in our oceans, spreading its unnatural, bisexual lifestyle. And it's high time somebody took a stand."

The controversial anemone, common to warm-water reefs and basins worldwide, has been practicing its alternative sexual lifestyle at least as far back as 1859, when Charles Darwin first catalogued its phylum and species. Since then, over 40 subspecies of Telia felina have been identified as dually gendered.


The Baptist group also strongly denounced the anemone's reproductive habits and family structure.

"Unlike so many respectable, God-fearing creatures, the Telia felina reproduces asexually, openly mocking traditional family values by giving birth to and raising its young in a single-parent setting," Chester said. "This anti-Christian anemone, which has the audacity to think that a child can grow up properly without the benefit of two loving parents, is truly the Murphy Brown of the deep."


Rev. William Chester of the Save Our Seas Coalition.

Added Chester: "If you still doubt the pain and suffering wrought by this undersea abomination, just look into the eyes of a young anemone child forced to grow up wondering why Mommy and Daddy live in the same body. This, my friends, is not natural."


As part of its campaign against the invertebrate, Save Our Seas is calling upon Greenpeace and other environmental groups to cease their defense of endangered species and regions that fail to uphold high moral standards. The group is also threatening a boycott of aquariums that display the Telia felina or any other creature of questionable character.

"Is this the kind of marine invertebrate we want our children to see on their school field trips to the aquarium?" Chester asked. "By putting this sort of filth on display in our nation's aquariums—aquariums that are often federally funded with your tax dollars—we send our children the message that the transsexual lifestyle is not merely to be accepted, but encouraged."


"It is truly sad to see what could have been an upstanding Christian creature cross over to a life of depravity and abasement," Pastor Kenneth Boyle, director of the Loaves And Fishes Academy Of Christian Marine Biology, said of the Telia felina. "Just look at its flamboyant bright green and gold coloration. And its hundreds of effeminate tentacles, which sway back and forth temptingly in an effort to lure the spiritually weak. The Bible says that on the fifth day, God filled the oceans with living creatures, but surely this is not what He intended."