Love the sinner, hate the sin

“Veganism is a diet and lifestyle that seeks to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.”

Animals are great. I love my cats, and as I’ve said before, I wouldn’t go hunting if my life depended on it. BUT I do have this little problem with ethical vegans. Vegan and vegetarian lifestyles don’t bother me at all if health is the only incentive. But ethical veganism… ger! Ethical veganism can carry all sorts of annoying baggage with it, like fluorescent light bulbs, Obama posters, and PETA membership cards. This anti-veg feeling started in earnest a couple of months ago. Before this experience, I had been fairly apathetic towards veggie-only types. It all started right after I had finished my workout at the Y. I had finished earlier than usual and was waiting on Mom and Christian in the lobby. The Y has tons of magazines in their lobby. They usually have something interesting to read, but on this particular day they had a golfing magazine, a hunting magazine, a Family Circle and a certain vegan lifestyle magazine. Golfing magazine had a golfing green on it’s cover. Hunting magazine had guns and dead animals on it’s cover. Family Circle had a bunch of articles on, I don’t know, losing baby fat and the psychology of your three year old. Vegan magazine had colorful cupcakes on it’s cover. It was very attractive. I opened it. It was pretty inside, too! Until I actually started reading it. Creepy tattoos and vegan punk bands dotted it’s faux-cheerful pages. One article likened eating eggs to stealing money from a rich, sick old man. ‘He won’t know the money’s gone, but it would still be wrong’. Likewise the chicken wouldn’t know the egg was gone but it would still be wrong to ‘steal’ and eat the egg.

I believe the chicken was made for two purposes. To make delicious eggs for my Saturday morning omelet and/or to become an 8-piece bucket at KFC.

It got worse. I found out one of the regular columnists was one of my favorite cartoonists. Their article on vegan weddings made me hope I would never, ever meet anyone special from downtown Portland. The ‘hearty’ recipes had absolutely NO animal byproducts in them. No pork! No beef! No snakeskin or leather or cow’s hooves or CHEESE! The worst part was the magazine’s air of condemnation. Call it guilt if you like, but the entire time I was reading the issue, I felt as if a thousand soybean stained fingers were pointed at me. Thankfully the Y always has a selection. I picked up the hunting magazine.