Mr. Jank wrote a letter to the editor disputing my characterization of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He uses space to take on issues I never raised. He puts words in my mouth, words that are only in his imagination and not on the page that contained my original column.

Jank uses a translation of Thomas Aquinas that he himself made. He also hypes a book he is writing (has written?) which he claims will humble me. He obviously doesn't know me very well if he thinks he can accomplish that.

Jank should take a deep breath and stop hyperventilating long enough for his head to clear. Let's take a look at what I said, what Jank inferred from that, where he went wrong and we might be able to clear the air a smidgen.

Jank spends a considerable amount of time and effort proving that animals shouldn't be mistreated. I never said they should so you can throw out every word he devoted to that evidence -- it is merely excess verbiage that serves no purpose in the discussion except to cloud the issue.

Likewise the quote from Nicolai Harmann and Thomas Aquinas -- they have nothing to do with anything I said so I won't waste space responding.

I said that PETA was a fringe group that was similar to groups like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, I never said that PETA members were wacko extremists with a ditzy message. I would ask Jank how ethical he thought it was to tell people that I said something I did not, is that the level of ethics he thinks I should aspire to?

Is PETA a fringe group? Well their founder has been quoted as saying that humans are no different from animals and many members of PETA have repeated the same thing. I dispute that and so does most of the population.

Most people, I among them, believe that animals should be treated well and not abused but that using animals to produce milk, meat and other products is not abuse.

Most of the population would agree that humans possess an ineffable spark of something, call it the soul, animals lack.

PETA argues that animals are sentient and therefore should not be used for food. Again, most of the population at large do not agree with that assessment, the proof is in the numbers of people who claim to be vegetarian or vegan opposed to those who eat meat, which group is larger?

How small a percentage of the population does a group have to be to be considered fringe? How far away from the core beliefs of their fellow citizens do a group's ideas have to be before they are considered out of the mainstream? Unfortunately neither I, nor anyone else, can answer those questions with any degree of authority, it is a matter of opinion and in my opinion PETA is small enough and their beliefs far enough away from the mainstream to merit the label "fringe".

Jank claims my column is callously un-Christian yet he offers no evidence to support that contention, perhaps he extrapolated that conclusion from evidence that only exists in his head since the foundation for it doesn't exist in my original work.

If Jank wants to publish a book on ethics I applaud his efforts but perhaps he should let someone check it for logical fallacies. If his book is anything like his letter to the editor the logic in it is probably not unassailable.