Christians Caught in the Middle of Political Food Fight
Both Wes Moore and the Maryland Freedom Caucus found a way to make today’s lunch into a proxy war for their respective brand commitments, with farmers and Christians as Collateral damage.
Today is MeatOut Day in Maryland, and somehow, both sides of the aisle have managed to make eating lunch a political statement.
Governor Wes Moore signed a proclamation designating March 20 as “MeatOut Day in Maryland,” encouraging residents to explore plant-based diets as a matter of health and environmental stewardship. The date was not accidental, or at least should not have been treated as if it were. March 20 is a Friday during Lent, a period when millions of Christians, most notably Catholics like me, abstain from eating meat as a religious observance. Moore’s office has framed this as a health initiative, not a religious one, which is both technically accurate and rather convenient.1
Here is the thing about MeatOut Day: it is organized by the Farm Animal Rights Movement, a nonprofit whose stated goal is ending the use of animals for food entirely. Moore did not simply encourage Marylanders to eat a salad, he aligned the Office of the Governor with a group whose long-term objective is eliminating animal agriculture as an industry. That may work for Moore’s Presidential ambitions, but it has real-life consequences at home.
Maryland has roughly 2 million acres of farmland, and poultry is its number one agricultural product. About half of every dollar earned on a Maryland farm is earned on a chicken farm, contributing $5.4 billion in economic development and $354 million in state and local taxes. Those are not abstractions. Those are people’s livelihoods, and Moore just lent his official imprimatur to the organization working to end them.
The political calculus is not hard to read. Moore’s national ambitions are being battered thanks to redistricting failures, agency scandals, and the state’s fiscal crisis. Signing a proclamation for a coastal, activist-friendly cause costs him nothing in the donor class he is cultivating. The problem is that Maryland is not a collection of donor zip codes. It includes the Eastern Shore, farm families across the Piedmont, and thousands of workers whose jobs depend on industries Moore just agreed to stigmatize.
Maryland was built on farming and, to a certain extent, still is. Certainy in Western Maryland and on the Shore it is.
Choosing to do this performative stunt on a Lenten Friday adds an extra layer of obliviousness or, more likely, provocation. Catholics who are already abstaining from meat today are not the audience for this proclamation. The audience is everyone else. Asking non-Catholics to join a plant-based day that happens to coincide with Lent is, at minimum, a bad-faith use of the calendar, and at its worst, a way to make Moore’s animal rights advocacy look like something other than what it is. It is a cheap trick. Moore knows better, but he and his political team don’t care.
That said, the response from the Maryland Freedom Caucus deserves equal scrutiny, and here it gets embarrassing for different reasons.
Delegate Kathy Szeliga posted a Maryland Freedom Caucus graphic today with a picture of a steak and the words “COME AND TAKE IT.” The message: eat meat today, as an act of political defiance against the Moore ceremonial proclamation. Set aside for a moment that “Come and Take It” is a reference to the Battle of Gonzales, a moment from the Texas Revolution that has been somewhat diluted by appearing on roughly four million truck bumpers.
The Maryland Freedom Caucus, in the name of owning Wes Moore, has chosen as its hill to die on the affirmative insistence that they and their supporters eat meat on a day when their own faith calls them to abstain.
That is not owning the libs. That is owning yourself.
The Freedom Caucus has real arguments to make about how Moore has treated Maryland’s farming sector. Solar mandates threatening productive farmland, neglect of the oyster industry, the general pattern of treating rural Maryland as a rounding error in the state’s budget math. Those are legitimate grievances, and they deserve to be taken seriously. What they do not deserve is to be laundered through a culture-war food fight where the conservative response to a meaningless proclamation is to post steak memes on a Friday in Lent.
Moore cynically attached an animal rights agenda to a religious observance to make it look like something it wasn’t. The Maryland Freedom Caucus responded by telling its members to eat meat today, which, for certain supporters of that caucus, means telling them to break their Lenten fast. Both sides found a way to make today’s lunch into a proxy war for their respective brand commitments. The actual Maryland agriculture industry is just scenery in both productions.
The farmers deserved better than this. So, for that matter, did the Gonzales militia.¹
Moore's office subsequently clarified that he "believes in a well-balanced diet, including meat and vegetables", which is exactly the kind of CYA statement you issue when you have realized you signed something you did not fully think through.