Vegan

You know, when I was a kid, the ACLU sued to protect the free speech rights of Nazis (literal Nazis - the National Socialist Party of America) marching in Skokie.

I understand being a Nazi isn't as big a deal these days, but back then, only 30 years after the end of World War II, just about every adult in the United States knew somebody who'd died fighting in Europe or the Pacific, and everybody hated Nazis.

And what the ACLU said - which really sticks with me, even now - was that the most hated people in America were the canaries in the coal mine. If the people our country hates the most, the people who, according to the public, least deserve Constitutional rights, still have those rights, we can feel confident that everybody else's rights are safe too.

So when people today say people convicted of certain crimes should be tortured and castrated, or that bad people don't deserve to have their pronouns respected, or, like in this case, a prisoner convicted of heinous crimes doesn't deserve to have dietary preferences - that's what I think of. The argument that unalienable means unalienable. That everybody means everybody. And that when the worst and most hated people complain their rights are being violated, we should take those complaints exactly as seriously as we would anybody else's, because protecting their rights protects everyone else's too.