You'll circumlocute less if you don't repeat.

You consider Mr. Beatie to be a lesbian: a woman who loves a woman. Therefore, by your defining, this is a gay issue. By my defining, since queer is an LGBT umbrella, it's a queer issue.

But I'm done. Perhaps you can achieve redemption someday somehow with someone. That someone won't be me. And you can wait until the next LGBT thread to reiterate all your hoary positions, but I won't engage you. The only thing you offer is to smile at gay folks when they're present. Hell, even Senator Helms was famous for being civil in front of folks.

Man, you've never had a pen of pigs that turned on each other, have you?

I don't eat much meat anymore, but when I do, I occasionally kill it myself. I have it squirm, bleed, shiver, and then quiet in my hands. I suggest that everyone who kills to eat actually do that, from time to time. We're too removed from the killing that puts meat on our plates. If your hands drip with blood, if you've felt the animal shiver its last, you won't be cavalier about eating meat. And you won't don bacon as if that constituted cute.

...for lack of customers, but for lack of safety, as in it wasn't safe to drive a Dussey by a breadline. America will be reradicalized and more is more will be the cause, for more of us consuming more necessarily means that many of us will have less.

Considering too many people drives all our problems, abortions should be required and only gay people should be allowed to marry.

Great post.

That corn syrup reminds me of nicotine, which rewires us to want it evermore.

Her box is for procreation. Period. She should gussy only to procreate. Anything else is profligate. So sayeth some part of the bible, I'm sure. Likewise, Viagra circumvents God's plan for universal drooping.

I listened to some fundy radio station the other talking about sex. They called it romance. They couldn't even say s-e-x.

"You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group."

It's not just that he said the above, it's that he delivered the line with his Cheshire cat grin.

So, Mormon Heaven is a bone-bumping, corporeal, procreative-runaway train? That certainly appeals to the beast in us: replicating one's DNA. I see the same desire in my garden, where I've got these red-backed beetles who hump and hump in heaps of exoskeletal lust and don't even bother scurrying from my apocalyptic shoe.

Fine writing: a stew of humor, pig parts, and food channel.

And I applaud anyone who's moved even inches closer to the food that they swallow.

I made the same point in the earlier pork essay. Every meat eater should wield the knife. Not the steak knife. The butcher's knife.

Ms. Hepola, in her earlier article, wrote, "To love bacon is to sink your teeth into life, to refuse to nibble at the side salad or sip on the seltzer with a twist of lime."

Well, meat eaters should sink the knife into life and feel it shudder, feel the warm blood leak onto their fingers. I might be sounding like Hannibal Lecter here, but I urge meat eaters (I am one.) to comprehend, by blood and tremor, what they're swallowing and tender to it all due respect.

At least Ms. Traister is a little closer to the killing than most Americans.

I also agree that even vegan folks dispense death, by what they eat, how they bathe, what they wear, and even if they were to ride a hemp bicycle to an organic farm.

How many microorganisms are washed into the drain when we bathe?

To us, we're prettying ourselves.

To them, it's, "The horror, the horror."

However, it's those organisms closest to us in appearance and size the that tend to evoke our compassion. We are all killing and eating machines, just as we'll be killed and eaten, by cancer, bacteria, and mold.

The difference is that we've declared the dog our pal and the pig our pork.

It's construct, as is everything.

But, sagcat, I expect you do the same. Dogs and pigs are your pals and your body's external bacteria, by soap and drain, are given their porcelain apocalypse.

FYI, having lived on a pork farm and spent time in the slaughterhouse and the Oscar Meyer plant, I don't eat pork. Is that what they call too much education?