SOUL FOOD:

Recent reports of animal carcasses abandoned and found in Newport Beach opened online debates that ranged from whether lobsters and crabs suffer when boiled alive to how Fidel Castro has managed to outlive five presidents since John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

By my count, Castro has outlived only four of our presidents. As head of state of Cuba, though, he did remain in power throughout nearly three times that many presidential terms.

Now I know many folks consider Castro to be an animal of sorts. Nevertheless you may be wondering how he came into this discussion.

The common thread between crustaceans and Castro is Santería, an Afro-Caribbean religion that in some forms melds various non-Christian elements of Roman Catholicism with the spiritual practices and beliefs of its West African Yoruba tribes.

Over the years some have suggested that Castro himself practices it. Others instead credit practitioners of the religion for his protection.

Santería has a long history in Caribbean countries such as Puerto Rico, Mexico and Cuba. But who in this country in the 1950s knew who Babalu Aye was when Ricky Ricardo (played by Cuban-born Desi Arnaz) wooed his sitcom wife along with fans of the “I Love Lucy” show with his familiar “Babalu-Aye,” accompanied by the beat of congas.

Penned by Cuban composer Margarita Lecuona, the song is about one of Santería’s major spirit deities, or “orishas.”

In more recent decades, the presence of Santería has grown in the United States. It became well known to law enforcement after the Supreme Court case Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, which upheld the church’s right to practice animal sacrifice after the Florida city had outlawed it.

Local police have speculated that the remains recently found in Newport Beach — to date, six chickens (three headless), a duck, three rabbits and a headless goat — were the result of animal sacrifices made by practitioners of Santería.

The failure of police, on this basis, to further investigate created something of an uproar. A flurry of 78 comments followed a brief account of the discoveries posted online by the Orange County Register.

One reader wrote, “And they put Mike Vick in jail? These people should be right along him.” Another wrote, “I think we all know evil when we see it.”

One-fifth of the comments were removed for violating user guidelines. Conceding that any online community can attract its share of jerks, that still seems a sign — at least in part — of the emotion this issue elicits.

There was outrage over the idea of animals being sacrificed for religious reasons. Letters to the editors of local papers, and an editorial and a blog post by Brady Rhoades, managing editor of the Daily Pilot, made that clear.

(You may know Brady Rhoades as the editor of the Huntington Beach Independent, which is a sister paper to the Daily Pilot.)

The editorial was headlined, “Freedom taken to extreme,” the blog, “Behead a goat and get on with your life, sans prison.”

Rhoades concluded that for this to happen Food and Agricultural Code 19501 (part of California’s humane commercial slaughter provisions) took precedent over Penal Code section 597(a), of which he wrote, “makes it illegal to harm animals.”

In an op-ed the next day, Kelly Broelow Dunagan insinuated that Lt. Craig Fox, a Newport Beach police officer who spoke to reporters about the animal remains, was plain ignorant of Penal Code section 597(a).

Dunagan called for law enforcement to use this law “to stop the Santerians from committing these egregious and barbaric acts.” She defined animal sacrifice for religious reasons as torture, out of hand.

To appeal to Penal Code section 597(a), she pretty much has to since the code does not make it illegal to harm animals in any way, shape or form. Shoot, animals are harmed every day when we slaughter them, however humanely — or not, for food.

Heck, in the factory farm industry you can behead cows, lambs, pigs, sheep or chickens 40 hours a week, or more, and get paid.

In medical, science and cosmetic industry experiments, animals suffer harm every day. We hunt animals for sport.

Herds that are deemed a nuisance are reduced by mass slaughter. We exterminate rodents and other animals we regard as pests. We “euthanize” strays.

And, yes, we boil lobsters and crayfish and crabs alive for our culinary pleasure, without fear of jail time.

Section 597(a) outlaws the malicious and intentional maiming, mutilation, torture, wounding or killing of a live animal. Sections 597(c) and (d) clarify this code in relation to California Fish and Game Code.

Dunagan built her case against religious animal sacrifice upon several flawed ideas. She characterized animal sacrifice as torture by definition, regardless of the means employed in the slaughter of an animal.

She alluded to the Supreme Court’s 1993 decision in the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah case but explained the court’s decision with a deceptive twist. In doing so, she misapplied a quote from Marci A. Hamilton’s book, “God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law.”

The court decided against the city of Hialeah, which sought to prevent animal sacrifices by the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, not because it singled out one religion — in this case Lukumi, or Santería — over another religion for the ban, as Dunagan claimed.

The court ruled against Hialeah because it sought to prevent the (lawfully humane) killing of animals for religious reasons while allowing the (lawfully humane) killing of animals for secular reasons. This is what made the statutes enacted by Hialeah unconstitutional.

A review of Hamilton’s book in the Michigan Law Review has shown it to be peppered with legal and factual errors. Still, Hamilton’s premise that some religious behavior must be regulated is not wholly without merit. But neither she nor Dunagan can characterize these behaviors as they please (such as defining any religious killing of an animal as torture) in order to ban it.

I loathe animal cruelty. I’m a vegetarian because our nation’s factory farming disgusts me.

And these recent discoveries of animal remains have troubled me. But many of the reactions to the discoveries — including their attribution to Santería — have troubled me more. Next week, I’ll explore that further still.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.