Propositions

Next Tuesday, Californians will vote on Proposition 2, an amendment that would ban the cruelest practices involved in food animal production, specifically, those that “do not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.”

It has always seemed strange to me that we have rather stringent laws protecting our pets from cruelty, but virtually none designed to protect our food animals? Why such a profound disparity?

The answer, of course, is very simple. Most people just don’t know what an unconscionably cruel system produces their meat. They’ve never been to a meat factory. They don’t know anyone who works there. Never bothered to sit down and have a chat with a chicken raised in a battery cage, or a veal calf that spent its entire short life immobilized in a crate. They’d rather not think about it.

But most people are not wicked. They’re perfectly willing to pay about 1% more for their meat in order that the animals be raised in slightly more humane conditions.

The meat industry in California has unleashed a multi-million dollar campaign of misinformation opposing Amendment 2. I’d like you to consider helping fund the effort to counter this campaign. Doing so could mean an end to the cruelest kinds of treatment for millions of farm animals.

Even if the amendment passes, we’ve got a very long way to go to get to a point where our meat is produced in a way that can be countenanced with anything other than shame and horror. But this is a start.

While on the subject of California ballot initiatives, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Proposition 8. It's the one that would ban gay marriage. I refuse to link to any of this garbage, but there are prominent nut cases all over the place saying that if the proposition doesn't pass, it will certainly signal the Armageddon, and that life as we know it is over, and other such spectacularly over-blown hyperbole.

I'm sure that none of you need convincing, but allow me to frame the argument in my famously succinct way. Marriage, as far as the state is concerned, is an agreement to jointly own property with another person, which carries with it various other legal provisions. The end.

Marriage in any other sense is a religious or spiritual institution that the state has no business in. For historical and unfortunate reasons, the state calls a civil union between two individuals a "marriage", and has no constitutional grounds to distinguish between by which parties such a union is entered into.

What so-inclined religious zealots perhaps should be arguing is that the state should not be involved in the sacred sacrament of "marriage" at all, since doing so moves the sacrament into the secular realm, certainly not a fit domain for a spiritual institution of such profound religious importance.

That certain individuals get so upset about the notion of two members of the same gender jointly owning property is yet another example of making God in one's own image; they don't like gay people and so obviously neither does God. And what an easy way to garner favor with the Almighty! Just speak vitriolically, eat your Wheaties, and click the "Yes" box next to Prop 8. Welcome to Heaven you fucking retard.

But I digress. Please support Proposition 2.