“Recently, I became a vegetarian. Not for animal rights purposes, mind you, though I’m not big on agribusiness practices. No, I did it for social and environmental reasons. I just don’t see the sense in using so much land to grow so much grain for so many cows, when there are so many hungry people in the world. Now, that right there ought to fulfill multiple expectations of the rural man- I’m trying to act pragmatically, responsibly, with personal integrity, and thriftily; I’m doing this against waste and against agro-industrial practices that screw up our common home and the lives we live in it. Yet, the fact that I just ate a lentil stew with a side of curried tofu ensures that my penis is now a nonfunctional organ hanging in front of my rapidly developing ovaries, and my flannel shirts have all just become ‘ironic’.”
“
I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, “How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you, you were playing like a girl?” Now, I expected him to say something like, “I’d be sad; I’d be mad; I’d be angry,” something like that. No, the boy said to me, the boy said to me, “It would destroy me.”
And I said to myself, “God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?”
”
