Veganism is a philosophy that emphasizes abstinence from animal products to the exclusion of all other alternatives to factory farming, particularly regarding free range, organic, locally raised animal products. This lifestyle promotes animal product abstinence until death and either completely avoids any discussion about raising animals humanely for meat and dairy, or ridicules the inadequacies of attempts to do so.

Sound like anything else we know?

Abstinence-only sex education is a form of sex education that emphasizes abstinence from sex to the exclusion of all other types of sexual and reproductive health education, particularly regarding birth control and safe sex. This type of sex education promotes sexual abstinence until marriage and either completely avoids any discussion about the use of contraceptives, or only reveals failure rates associated with such use.

Proponents of abstinence-only sex education point out that not having sex is the only way to guarantee that you will not get an STD or get pregnant. Similarly, vegans say that animal product abstinence is the only foolproof way to reduce damage to the environment, animal torture, and the odds of getting heart disease, colon cancer or E. coli.

Yet expecting everyone to abstain from all animal products is unrealistic, and by not teaching meat eaters about differences in animal product quality, vegans leave those who aren’t willing to give up all animal foods in ignorance, unlikely to make more reasonable changes to their diet that might have improved the lives of animals, been easier on the environment, or protected their health.

Just as evangelicals mock the idea of safe sex, saying sex is always risky outside the bonds of marriage, vegans don’t believe that safe meat eating is possible. They make no distinction between the health or morality of any animal products, and so preach complete avoidance. To most vegans, eating a wild-caught salmon would be no different than eating a highly processed hamburger patty made of hundreds of bovines from across the globe. Meat in any form is an indistinct glob of blood-soaked, cholesterol-ridden, cancer-causing, heart-clogging saturated fat swimming in depravity.

Even though killing a wild deer is better for the environment than raising a cow on corn, environment-loving vegans will not say that if you eat meat, try to hunt it yourself or eat animals raised on their natural diet — instead, they will explain the joys of industrially-produced textured vegetable protein burgers with nutritional yeast cheese.

A vegan will tell you that fish = mercury. And they probably won’t clarify that predator fish such as tuna, shark, dolphin, and swordfish have the most mercury, but that wild salmon, sardines, mackerel and anchovies are a safe bet. The fact that tuna has mercury is enough to taint just about everything else under the sea, except for seaweed. But even if vegans did generally recognize that some fish are healthier than others, you cannot be trusted to eat fish responsibly anyway, so it’s best that you just avoid it all together.

The most effective way to enforce abstinence is through scare tactics. The New York Times story a couple of Sundays ago about the part-time vegetarian paralyzed from a burger tainted with E. coli inspired the vegan blogger Vegetarian Star to write an entry trying to frighten flexitarians, people who only eat meat occasionally:

Is it safe to be “mostly vegetarian?”

Stephanie Smith has a heart wrenching story that may cause some flexitarians to rethink their habits.

Smith is the 22 year old woman who ate a burger tainted with e.coli and experienced a trail of medical problems, including diarrhea, seizures, and convulsions, that eventually left her paralyzed for what experts believe is for life.

Only 22 years of age.

And Smith was a dance instructor.

“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’” Smith said of the tainted patty made by Cargill, that was labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.”

The New York Times reports that, “The Smiths were slow to suspect the hamburger. Ms. Smith ate a mostly vegetarian diet, and when she grew increasingly ill, her mother, Sharon, thought the cause might be spinach, which had been tied to a recent E. coli outbreak.”

It’s argued that meat can be made “safer,” by buying organic and taking other precautions, but every time you “cheat,” could you be putting your life in serious jeopardy?

Not much different than an evangelical gravely relating the story of young Jenny, a teenage virgin who was planning on saving herself for marriage, but then went to a party and got drunk, forgot her promise, slept with a stranger, and got HIV her first time having sex.

The real lesson there is that Jenny should have used protection and been more selective about who she slept with. Just as the lesson from Stephanie Smith’s story isn’t that nobody should eat meat ever, but that we should be more careful about what meat we do eat, and how we prepare it. That, however, implies that life is complicated and full of gray areas and difficult choices, something that “no sex” and “no meat” activists don’t tend to admit.

What makes the vegan sermon even weaker than the evangelical anti-sex version is that while complete sexual abstinence is an extreme measure, it will at least accomplish what proponents claim. But if some of us were to follow Vegetarian Star’s advice and avoid all meat because Stephanie Smith’s life was ruined from a bad burger, that wouldn’t necessarily save us.

According to a reliable authority: “A main source of [E. coli] infection is undercooked ground beef; other sources include consumption of raw milk and juice, raw sprouts, lettuce, and salami, and contact with infected live animals.”

If Vegetarian Star wanted to steer his readers away from all food sources of E. coli, he wouldn’t tell us to avoid all meat, he would warn us from processed meats, raw dairy, and high-risk vegetables (or at least tell us to wash those vegetables more thoroughly). He would also suggest not going to the vegan-run Farm Sanctuary and petting the animals there.

Influenced by such advice, a meat eater might think to skip the ground beef from Cargill and go to the deli counter for the much safer and healthier buffalo steak. But Vegetarian Star doesn’t want us to be safer meat eaters. He wants us to be born again meat virgins.

If veganism were only about health, it’s unlikely that vegans would take such a hard line. And if abstinence-only sex education were mainly about avoiding disease, it wouldn’t be so afraid of compromises like “the c word” (as my high school health teacher referred to condoms). But both have grander motivations than that: morality. Sex and meat are simply wrong, so even if there are ways to get away with doing them, you shouldn’t.

To the anti-sex league, sex outside of marriage is innately dirty and illicit. It is especially harmful to the moral fiber of those who engage in it, but it is so bad that its very existence brings a dark cloud even to the lives of those who do the right thing and wait for marriage, just from dwelling in the same society as these miscreants.

To vegans, it doesn’t make sense to delve into the nuances of what animals might be better to eat than others from a health, environmental and moral perspective, because what nuance could there be in torturing and then murdering another being for culinary delight? It’s not just meat eaters who suffer the consequences of this indecent behavior. Vegans do too, by having to be around it.

More than any other group than I know of (besides maybe factory farmers), vegans are the ones who shut down discussions of improving the conditions of animals that are going to be slaughtered.

Vegans ridicule the meat from animals raised in more humane ways as “happy meat,” and will almost never recommend it over eating meat from factory farms. Meat eaters who do go out of their way for free range meat rankle vegans with their “hypocrisy”. They are no better than the standard meat eater, just more deluded and self-serving.

Google “humane slaughter” and “free range” together and the first page is mainly vegan sites devoted to exposing the “humane myth.” Their primary critique seems to be that it is tried at all. Factory farming is what vegans point to when they criticize meat — to them the two are inextricably aligned, like premarital sex and abortion — so they refuse to consider that there might be a better way of raising animals for meat and dairy. Humane alternatives are doomed to fail because factory farming and slaughterhouses have convinced vegans that all meat is inherently evil.

Students of abstinence-only education can’t distinguish between safe ways of having sex and unsafe ways, because they haven’t been taught them. So if they aren’t scared away from sex, they often have sex without a condom and risk pregnancy and STDs, because they don’t know that there are better and worse ways to do it — it’s all the same to them.

Similarly, meat eaters who learn from vegans that all animal products are equally bad may continue to eat meat unwisely, eating fast food, fish sticks, nuggets and hamburgers, rather than seeking out healthier and more environmentally sound alternatives.

As if to make the allegory even more relevant, some vegans practice sexual abstinence along with their meat abstinence, at least when it comes to meat eaters. This phenomenon was first covered a couple of years ago in New Zealand. The woman who “discovered” vegans who don’t sleep with omnivores named them vegansexuals. The vegansexual reasoning was that omnivores are a literal graveyard of animal bodies, which kind of makes them less appealing to sexually ravage.

There is still a significant difference between meat abstinence and sex abstinence, though. Sexual puritanism at least provides something to look forward to - getting married and having sex one day. Vegans won’t even give us a meat-eating heaven.