SOUL FOOD:

For the sake of the animals we eat, for the sake of our own health and safety, it’s time, come November, to pass Proposition 2, the California Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act.

You may consider it blasphemy, but it matters more to me that you vote “yes” on Proposition 2 than who gets your vote for president.

Millions of animals on industrial farms in California are depending on you to deliver them from unspeakable cruelty. They have no vote.

If you think this isn’t a religious issue, think again. Yes, as humans we are allowed to eat animals — at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective.

The subject index in my new Green Bible, which highlights passages related to animals and nature in green, cites Deuteronomy 14:3-6 as a list of animals that may be eaten. In Acts 10:12-15 is the vision of Jesus’ disciple Peter, which revealed all animals to be edible.

In a post-resurrection story in Luke, Jesus eats fish. As a Jew and a rabbi, it’s likely he ate meat, at least at the Passover meal.

But as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out while he was known as Cardinal Ratzinger, “We cannot just do whatever we want with them.” Not morally.

In his essay, “A Religious Case for Compassion for Animals,” Matthew Scully quotes the Pope: “Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.”

A hard copy of the essay is available from the Humane Society of the United States or you can download a PDF copy from www.hsus.org/ religion/resources. The examples mentioned by Benedict XVI only scratch the surface of repugnant factory farming practices.

Pregnant pigs and veal calves are kept in metal pens so small they can’t turn around. They stand in their own filth.

Hens are confined in battery cages that prevent them from spreading their wings. Male chicks — useless for egg production — are suffocated to death by the thousands.

I’ll spare you more gory details. They are easily found on the Internet.

For the squeamish but resolute, the Humane Society now has an animated video titled “Uncaged.” It stars a strutting and singing swine that sounds reminiscent of Steve Wonder belting “Superstition.”

“There’s a proposition,” intones the pig with rhythm, “to save us from this hell.” And in another stanza, “For the family farmer, you’re doing what is best.”

There’s even a “Director’s Cut” of this 1-minute, 53-second, PG short that features bonus scenes of additional agriculture villains. If you have the gumption, you can watch four minutes of real factory farming horrors.

They hit as close to home as Chino, where the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. was investigated last year for abuses that included torturing then slaughtering downed cows for consumption. You can view them all at www.uncaged.yesonprop2.com.

As Elaine West says in “Eating Mercifully,” a new 20-minute documentary made for HSUS, “When you read about it or you hear about it, it’s different.”

West and her pastor husband run Rooterville, A Sanctuary Inc., an animal safe-haven in Archer, Fla. “When you see that kind of abuse and that kind of a [factory farming] system, um…” she says then chokes up.

Regaining her composure, she continues, “It’s so horrible. When I saw that, I was so ashamed that, especially as a Christian … that I was supporting that.”

“Eating Mercifully” looks at how a number of people are doing what HSUS President and Chief Executive Wayne Pacelle challenged people to do. A year ago at the launch of his organization’s Animal and Religion program, he asked people of faith to learn about the treatment of animals raised for food.

He asked them to square their consumption habits with their religious principles. He asked them to advocate for improved farm animal welfare at local, state and national levels.

The care of God’s creation and creatures has become a hot issue among people of faith in recent years. This past weekend lent some evidence to that.

On Saturday, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals and ecology, animals from geckos to Guinea pigs were brought to churches to be blessed. The next day, at the Huntington Beach Pier, a group of interfaith religious leaders and laity drew a crowd of about 400 to what they hope will become an annual Blessing of the Waves.

If fair weather and 6-foot waves can be taken as an indication, God was pleased. A more breathtaking morning is not to be seen in Surf City. The sun was bright. The air was clear and crisp without being chilly. The waves rolled in at heights that put a bit of a damper on a planned en-masse paddle out. But spirits weren’t dampened a bit.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange hosted the event. Father Matthew Munoz, from St. Irenaeus Catholic Church in Cypress, sporting brown hair well past his shoulders, a beard and a beige cassock under a beige-and-brown poncho, provoked a round of laughter when he told the crowd, “I’m not Jesus. I need a surfboard to walk on water.”

There were prayers representing Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Munoz and Father Christian Mondor of Saints Simon and Jude Catholic Church in Huntington Beach sprinkled the assembly with branches of rosemary dipped in blessed water.

Casting off cassocks for wetsuits, the priest and the Franciscan monk then dove into the waves, Mondor with a blue surfboard adorned with the image of the Virgin Mary.

The early-morning event drew a lot of media attention and participants still lingered when I left at 8 a.m. I won’t be surprised if next year, the crowd is larger.

Showing compassion to the animals we eat may not be as blissful as blessing the waves, but it’s just a great a moral imperative as caring for the environment.

Vote “yes” on Proposition 2.

Save California’s factory-farmed animals from the hell they’re now living in.

TO LEARN MORE

“Eating Mercifully” will become available from humanesociety.org/religion this week. An online study guide will be available as well.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].