Insults, Profanity Pepper Lecture in EMU Sociology Class

WARNING: Some of the comments made by Gary Yourofsky in this story are profane and may be offensive to some.

Eastern Michigan University students who eat meat are contributing to events worse than the Holocaust, according to an activist who spoke recently in an introductory sociology class at the college.

In the speech, Gary Yourofsky compared eating meat, cheese and eggs or drinking milk to bestiality. He also linked the fate of cows and chickens to the Holocaust. The controversial animal rights activist spoke for 40 minutes and littered his speech with profanities and insults that were directed at anyone who didn't agree with his viewpoints.

"You engage in carnivorous bestiality on a daily basis,” Yourofsky told the students. “Sometimes multiple times a day. You eat things that come out of a hen's ass and shove things into a turkey's ass. … You eat breast, legs and thighs and then you pay somebody else to sexually molest a cow and squeeze their nipples for you so you can steal their milk.

"There is a Holocaust taking place right now," Yourofsky also told the class. "It is the world's largest and longest running Holocaust."

Michigan Capitol Confidential listened to the unedited audio of the comments that were recorded by a student in the public university's Sociology 101 class. Campus Reform first reported the story last week.

EMU Spokesman Geoff Larcom said Yourofsky spoke to three of part-time lecturer Luis Sfeir-Younis’ classes and that the college received two complaints from students.

"Eastern Michigan takes student complaints and concerns very seriously. Administrators spoke to Sfeir-Younis to determine the context of the speaker's appearance, the reaction of students and what happened in class," Larcom said in an email. "As at nearly any American university, EMU does not require its hundreds and hundreds of professors or instructors to gain approval for the speakers they seek to have in class. Professors follow a standard of best academic practices, where it is understood that topics of speakers who appear in class should relate to the stated class material and the course syllabus."

Larcom said Sfeir-Younis said the main point of the lecture was to promote compassion and care for animals, to end cruelty and discrimination, to reassess the relationship between humans and animals, and to offer veganism as a political action to choose if one is interested in improving the treatment of animals.

On the audio, Sfeir-Younis tells the students there would be questions on a test regarding Yourofsky's talk.

Yourofsky's single focus on trying to shame students who eat meat came from a number of angles.

"The American flag, for example, which is nothing but a piece of fabric; the Bible, which is nothing but a book comprised of ink and paper, stir up more emotions than the murder of animals," he said. "If there were a barbeque on campus today and people were cooking up steak and hamburgers, man, there'd be a party. People would actually celebrate the cow who was killed, the person who killed the cow and the chef that seasoned her dead body. But if someone poured gasoline on the flag or the Bible, struck a match and set it on fire, Lord have mercy. There'd be an angry mob ready to kill somebody. These lifeless, inanimate objects — the flag and the Bible — are more sacred than animals."

He also gave students a lesson on chicken anatomy and described the "backside of a bird." 

"It's one hole but it serves many purposes," he said, before breaking into song. "(Starts to sing) It's the poop hole. It's the pee hole. It's the vaginal fluid hole (end singing).

"And it's the hole your scrambled eggs and omelets come from. Yeah. I remember back in the days I wanted my scrambled eggs with (expletive) sprinkles and urine splatter … all over it, too."

Leon Drolet, chairman of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance, said he didn't have issues with Yourofsky speaking to a class although he disagreed with the speaker's views.

"I don't mind when students are exposed to a wide variety of unexpected perspectives," Drolet said. "The views are extreme and portrayed crassly. I don't think it is necessarily wrong for students to hear these views. If the professor is doing a good job of putting it in context, then fine."

Yourofsky spoke at the University of Michigan in 2008 as a guest of a student animal rights group called Michigan Animal Respect Society, U-M Spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said.

Yourofsky has given more than 2,300 lectures across the United States at 178 schools, according to Animals Deserve Absolute Protection Today, the organization Yourofsky founded in 1996.

Yourofsky has been arrested 13 times and his website says he has been banned from Canada and the United Kingdom.

This is the second time this semester that students have been targeted during lectures or speeches in class. Professor William Penn went on an anti-Republican rant and threatened students in his creative writing class at Michigan State University.