Vegan speakers' message a sour one

This past week I began to think that my entire life was rotissarating around what I did or did not have in my stomach. It all started last Thursday, when I attended a vegan lecture sponsored by the Fox Leadership Program. Two days later, I fasted for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Sunday, I ate vegetarian victuals and worked at a soup kitchen in West Philadelphia. And Saturday night, after breaking the fast, I took my brother out to McDonald's for chicken nuggets, Big Macs and fries. I essentially ran the entire gamut of the food pyramid scheme trying to decide if the mantra "you are what you eat" still has validity.

As the week progressed, I kept backtracking to the vegan lecture because the activists, Gary Yourofsky and Kate Timko, left me with more questions about the animal rights movement than concrete answers. What kept eating at me during the lecture were the myopic viewpoints and blatant hypocrisies of these animal rights activists who consider themselves morally superior to those of us who choose to eat meat.

I don't care if people are vegan. In fact, I highly admire them for having a belief and sticking to it. But when vegans use their eating habits to declare moral victory over everyone else, I get more than a little distressed.

It was Timko and Yourofsky's hypocritical moral philosophy that really irked me. At the beginning of the lecture, we were handed copies of Yourofsky's biography, which said that he "has been arrested numerous times for random acts of kindness and compassion." Unfortunately for us, Yourofsky doesn't always extend these acts of kindness and compassion to his own species, saying in one interview in The Toledo Blade that he at one time "had been in favor of killing ... "vivisectionists,'" or scientists who use animals to research new medical drugs and treatment options for humans. Before I continue, I just want to make sure I get this straight. Killing animals is bad, but killing people who kill animals is good. Okay, just checking. Moving on.

Though Yourofsky repeatedly quoted civil liberties activists and equated his actions with the nonviolent resistance practiced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he is closely affiliated with the radical Animals Liberation Front, having a full section of his Web site devoted to his relationship with the organization. ALF has, in the past, used arson, destruction of private property, death threats and vandalism to espouse its cause, none of which I would consider "random acts of kindness and compassion." On his Web site, Yourofsky says that "ALF activists are not terrorists," but ALF domestically has caused over $110 million in damage. In 1999, ALF caused $1 million worth of damage at the University of Minnesota, "seriously imped[ing] research on Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer and other diseases," according to the Associated Press.

In addition, Yourofsky founded the Animals Deserve Absolute Protection Today and Tomorrow, a nonprofit animal rights organization that, in addition to abolishing animal consumption, calls itself "an unwavering supporter of human rights ... which seek[s] an end to discrimination of all kinds." During the lecture, both speakers repeatedly compared animal rights to human and civil rights. Yourofsky compared the lives of livestock chickens to those of black slaves and called the oppression of animals equivalent to that of women, because both are "reduced to body parts." The biased, emotionally strong language was like a political ad, designed to provoke its intended audience through a physiological reaction, not a logical one.

For example, on another part of his Web site, in a section entitled "Hitler was not Veg," Yourofsky disputes Hitler's supposed vegetarianism, calling him "a good ol'-fashioned meat-eating scumbag." This is the most illogical argument in favor of vegetarianism I have ever seen. The way I read it is as follows: Hitler ate meat. Hitler was bad. Therefore, people who eat meat are bad. Even more disturbing is what comes after that passage. Yourofsky writes, "It is frightening that many Jews, not to mention blacks, Latinos, gays and women -- groups who should empathize with the oppression of others -- promote pogroms, slavery, discrimination and holocausts against the animal kingdom. Obviously, this makes all of the aforesaid groups seem hypocritical to the world."

To single out minority groups and attempt to pander to their emotions by describing horrific actions taken against them in the past is morally abhorrent. The use of Hitler to make an argument is offensive to me, not just as a Jewish woman, but as a human being.

More than anything, I was upset at how nonchalant Yourofsky and Timko seemed when they were asked how they planned to get cheap vegan alternatives into urban areas, where people can't afford and don't have access to pricey soy, rice milk and tofu. Their response: Give up the cable TV for the extra money. Eat lentils, beans and rice instead. Then, Timko made a crack about people in urban areas driving SUVs. Yeah, that's what I'd call a real compassionate moral victory for animal rights.

Melody Joy Kramer is a junior English major from Cherry Hill, N.J. Perpendicular Harmony appears on Wednesdays.

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