I scream. You scream. We all scream…at Ben and Jerry’s.

It is not an incident that should bother me unduly — I do not eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and, moreover, think that the notion of mixing pretzels and ice cream sounds too much like a concoction thought up by drunken frat boys. The recent announcement, however, that Ben and Jerry’s will temporarily change the name of their “Chubby Hubby” product to “Hubby Hubby” in celebration of Vermont’s legalization of homosexual pseudo-marriage fills me with righteous fury as only the most flagrant demonstrations of evil and hypocrisy can.

Once again we are shown the semantic side of the moral war of our present age. As I discussed some weeks ago at The Catholic Thing website, once the vocabulary shifts, the conversation is unbalanced enough so that the true issue at hand is never really addressed. Often this insidious undermining of discourse proceeds with a degree of subtlety (How many people really recognize the invalidity of the term “homosexual” used to describe a state of being?); this is flagrant and market-driven. “Eat our ice cream and prove that you are not a close-minded, hard-hearted bigot!”—That is their message! Meanwhile, we must curtail our evangelical impulses and, when a companion sneezes, say nothing more than “Bless you!” (less is preferable, of course, but as long as one avoids the extremely divisive step of saying the “G-word” in such context, modern sensibilities may remain relatively unsullied by the experience).

On the gastronomical side I am also offended. How dare they impose their views on our treasured delicacies? The Caliphs of Baghdad (reportedly enamored of their own breed of chilly dairy desserts) were not subjected to this sort of offensive behavior. The Mughal emperors could enjoy a hearty bowl of the cold stuff in peace, without activists rushing in at them and trying to foist indecent connotations onto their colored sprinkles. Even the Emperor Nero, that twisted and tragic fellow, did not (to my knowledge) invest his icy bonne bouche with anti-Christian significance.

Bah!