Vegans Offer The Pope A Million Bucks

A Vegan group is offering the Pope a million dollars to go vegan for Lent.

(If he turns them down, I ABSOLUTELY VOLUNTEER. HECK, I’D GO VEGAN FOR EVERY LENT. MAYBE FOREVER. PLEASE GIVE ME THE MONEY. I will do it.)

According to Daily Wire:

A vegan group is hoping to lobby Pope Francis to transform the Catholic penitential season of Lent into a campaign for veganism.

“Million Dollar Vegan announced the crusade on Feb. 6, challenging the leader of the Catholic Church to abstain from consuming animal products for the six-week period leading up to Easter, which falls this year on April 21,” reports Fox News.

DUDE. DO IT! Totally worth a million dollars.

But also… does the Pope need a million dollars? No. But I bet a lot of CHARITIES do!

In an open letter to Pope Francis, 12-year-old vegan activist Genesis Butler urged the Roman Pontiff to promote veganism for Lent as part of his fight against climate change.

“In your encyclical letter, ‘Laudato si,’ you stated that every effort to protect and improve our world will involve changes in lifestyle, production, and consumption. I agree with all my heart and seek your support in tackling one of the largest underlying causes of the problems we face: animal agriculture,” Butler wrote. “Farming and slaughtering animals causes a lot of suffering and is also a leading cause of climate change, deforestation, and species loss. When we feed animals crops that humans can eat, it is wasteful. And with a growing world population, we cannot afford to be wasteful.”

You can read the rest of her letter here.

“We are launching this deliberately bold, audacious campaign to jolt our world leaders from their complacency,” said Matthew Glover, the CEO of Million Dollar Vegan and co-founder of the hugely successful Veganuary campaign. “For too long they have failed to act on evidence of the damage caused to people and the planet by animal agriculture. Worse, many have defended and subsidized that very industry. But the evidence now is stark and compelling, and we cannot afford for them to remain silent any longer. We are thankful that Pope Francis has spoken out on these issues and that is why we are humbly asking him to try vegan for Lent and set an example of how each of us can align our principles of caring and compassion with our actions.”

Million Dollar Vegan has touted itself as an organization that fights climate change with diet change. Genesis Butler became vegan at age six and convinced her whole family to follow her. She became the youngest TEDx content producer when she delivered the speech, “A 10 Year Old’s Vision for Healing the Planet.”

I personally have no issue with people deciding to be vegan.

It’s really only when vegans and vegetarians are aggressively judgemental of those who don’t follow their eating habits that I have a problem with it. Which means… if they’re being respectful of others, I have ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM being respectful of them.

It’s really popular to rip on vegans, but I don’t see the point. I’ve had a lot of great vegan and vegetarian food. Writing internet comments about how “ALL VEGAN AND VEGETARIAN FOOD IS CRAP SO I’LL NEVER EVEN TRY IT” doesn’t really make you “cool” in my book. I don’t understand this whole “CONSERVATIVES MUST ONLY EAT RED MEAT” attitude. I’m a conservative and I LOVE red meat. I also love a good portobello mushroom melt. Being conservative means I CAN EAT WHATEVER I WANT. STAY OUT OF MY BUSINESS. THANKS.

Respect is a two-way street. I’m ALWAYS cool with that. You respect me, I respect you, I keep eating bacon… unless of course someone pays me to stop.

So CALL ME, vegans. I love bacon… but I love BRINGING HOME THE (veggie) BACON wayyyyy more.