Good Morning.

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled “Ask a Vet” for a special blog. AAV will air in its entirety on Saturday Morning – don’t forget to tune in!


So last Friday, America changed for the better. I was actually stunned by the news, and spent quite a few minutes bumbling giddily around my desk until I was able to settle down again.

Predictably, haters flooded the interwebs with vile spew and speculation, hatred for love and lovers, and complete disrespect, IMHO, for that veritable institution they claim to cherish so much. In an effort to be helpful, I’ve had the crack AAV research team skim several major religious works. Let’s tally up their findings, shall we?

Of course we’ll start with the one we all know best. Two of the three Abrahamic religions refer to this book as their primary text – conveniently broken down into “Old” and “New” sections.

Overall, the term “love” appears in print a whopping 686 times. Of course, some of these are banal references to person X “loves” person Y, and so on. “Hate” only makes 127 appearances, or only about 18% of the “love” total. Interesting.

So let’s move on…next we’ll check in on Mohammed’s writings. “Love” makes just 112 appearances there. But for all the histrionics about Islam being a religion of hate…the word only appears 43 times out of the 114 Surahs, and many of those references are warnings not to do things that are “hateful” towards Allah.

But how about a non-Abrahamic religion? The next largest in the world is probably Hindu; their text is called the “Bhagavad Gita”. I suspect there may be a problem in translating this work, as “love” makes a mere 8 appearances in this text. Surprisingly enough, “hate” makes 15 appearances throughout the work.

I’d take a look over everyone’s friend the Dalai Lama, but if he has even said the word “hate” in his entire lifetime, I’d be surprised. There cannot be even a mote of disagreement in his body. Would that we could all follow this example.

But back to the familiar love and hate we should all know. Remarkably, Jesus did not actually proscribe us to “love the sinner, but hate the sin”. Like most things associated with Jesus, that came much later, and it’s attributed to Saint Augustine:



But love is probably the most powerful of all. Not wanting to join that festival of hate espoused by the hypocritical so-called “followers of Jesus”, I’ll leave you with something one of his followers actually did say…being Paul in a letter to the Corinthians. Point of fact, this was one of the passages that Mrs. TriSec and I chose to have read at our own wedding.



The decision of the courts cannot have weakened or disparaged the “institution” of marriage in any way. By following the words of Paul, “The greatest of these is love”, we have only moved ourselves forward…and perhaps closer to the creator.