Backyard BBQs Just Aren't the Same Anymore

[eredien]

[Poll #1641179]

Comments

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Ever is the operative word.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Ever? Sure.

In my lifetime? Possibly.

I suppose the question is if the American people are likely to elect an omnivourous woman or a vegetarian man first, with all other factors being as equal as plausible.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i don't think it's likely to happen in my lifetime, but i think there will be periods of time within my lifetime when the American public would be willing to elect a vegetarian president if somebody that was otherwise appealing came along. i don't know if they'd be willing to accept a president who endorsed vegetarianism as objectively good on the basis of secular ethical considerations, but i think somebody who was a vegetarian for clearly personal reasons, especially medical reasons, would be relatively electable. i also think somebody who was a vegetarian for religious reasons might be electable at some point in the next few decades, if they could get over the funny religion issue more generally (maybe a Republican Sikh*?)

what Americans aren't willing to elect, and won't be willing to elect at any point in the foreseeable future, is somebody they think is judging them for eating meat.

*from a certain perspective, the symbolism of the kirpan has a lot of potential resonance for the open carry movement. just sayin'. sure, these days the American right doesn't like anybody wearing a turban, but that's a made-up-enemy-of-the-moment thing, and those tend to rotate in and out on their own.

[rabidfangurl.livejournal.com]

The vegetarian will get elected before the atheist, that's for sure.

[khava.livejournal.com]

Depends on the type of vegetarian. I don't think the U.S. is likely to elect an "activist" vegetarian, by which I mean the type of vegetarian who believes eating meat is immoral and tells others they are wrong to do so. I do think the U.S. would, right now, elect someone who is "personally" vegetarian but doesn't talk about it.

[blondestwolf.livejournal.com]

I agree with the other commenters that people would never go for it if they thought they were being judged. Maybe the candidate would have to be married to an omnivore or otherwise from an omnivore family to show that they weren't judging meat eaters. (I think in particular being married to someone who'd eat *anything* would be an advantage at state dinners...)

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

This, yes. I believe that at some point America will elect a Black mtf lesbian atheist vegetarian in a wheelchair who doesn't like football.

But I also suspect that this may not happen until a point in the future when the major political issues involve the questions of rights for clones and genetically-engineered hyper-intelligent dogs and A.I.s an cryogenically frozen revived people. And there will be so many new and exciting Others to hate and fear that a lot of the old divisions just won't matter any more.

At the moment, I agree with people below-- a person who just happened to be vegetarian and didn't talk about it much has a good shot. A person who is politically active about vegetarianism and trying to encourage it in others, not so much. I will note that I can't remember the last time we had a President who was an activist, rather than a person who held certain political views (albeit strongly).

[q10.livejournal.com]

omnivorous woman. i'm not saying this because i think on an individual basis omnivorous women are more electable, but just because omnivorous women are a much larger population (probably by about an order of magnitude).

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Good point. Although of course with that line of thinking, we should consider that we elected a biracial/African American identified man before a Caucasian woman. The percentages in the US are 2.4, 12.4 and 32%, respectively (wikipedia/census data) A 1994 Roper poll suggests about 3.5% of males and 4% of females do not eat meat.

[hebinekohime (from livejournal.com)]

In the sense of personal practice, yes. In the sense of following veganism to its obvious conclusion and not killing /humans either/, then no; by the time we're ready for that we'll have abolished the military, and I think the old notion of 'chain of command' will go with it, including the presidency.