Lest I appear more out of my gourd than usual, I should stress that looking at the face of vegan professor T. Colin Campbell was a bit of a revelation for me yesterday.

I realized that political preference can be a taste.

This is not an easy thing to contemplate, but I think it's true. People spend an awful lot of time trying to change each other's preferences, and they forget that in matters of taste, there can be no disagreements. (Well, I suppose anyone can dispute anything, but the ancient wisdom holds that taste-based disputes are a waste of time.)

Not very often have I experienced an insight so simultaneously comforting and unsetlling.

To think that it took a disagreement over food!

If only other matters were that easy.

Examples can be seen everywhere. Earlier this morning, the communitarian views of a minister in the Inquirer made me want to mentally vomit:

Last year, when churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania were asked to acknowledge the legal end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, Taylor thought it was about time to end the trade in silence at her own church.

"It's coming to terms with our illustrious ancestors and then realizing that they had slaves," she said yesterday, describing the motives and feelings behind the dedication. "It's hard for white people to deal with that - that the people who were our founders, and whom we're real proud of, had slaves. And they're both part of our church history, the same as they're part of our country's history and everything else."

The service and dedication - Frank Turner, the first African American bishop in the Episcopal diocese here, will deliver the sermon - has been generally welcomed by Trinity congregants, although not universally.

Taylor said some members of the congregation, which is almost entirely white, had expressed indifference, if not hostility.

"One thing I get from here is, 'My ancestors weren't here then, don't blame me. That was then, not now,' " said Taylor, who was born in Canada and is now a U.S. citizen.

"I say when I became American - because I wasn't American, either - that became part of my history, too," Taylor said. "That's the way I look at it. If you join this country, you adopt the good and the bad and the whole thing and you become an American. So in that respect I am responsible. I made myself responsible when I became an American."

Etc. (I've written about this more than a few times.)

Sigh.

But to the extent that it is an argument, it really is a hopeless one. Individualist thinking and communitarian thinking are like tar and water. Like meat-eaters versus vegans. They just disagree. I can say that the communitarian view is wrong till I'm blue in the face, while communitarians can say the individualist view is wrong till they're blue in the face.

This is an argument over taste. Of course, this is my blog, and I like to discuss my tastes here.

Suppose I declare, for now and forever -- my love for paella!

Yummmmmmmm!

And my love for Cream filled donuts!

Mmmmmmmmm!

But I don't like liver and I don't like hard boiled eggs.

Ick!

No, I will not upload pictures of what I don't like -- especially of liver. It would just be too gross, and I don't want to look at them in my own blog. I recognize, though, that there are two sides to this issue. The pro-livers think their pictures are mouth-watering, while the anti-livers think they're disgusting.

Again, I share the "Ick!" reaction of the latter, but de gustibus and all that stuff....