Assuming that vegetarians and vegans—because of their underlying moral philosophies—show greater empathy towards animal suffering, it is very well possible that this enhanced empathy extends to other humans also.

Either these gentlemen are more ethically tone deaf than one can imagine, or they are sly beyond the dreams of foxes in an effort to redirect attention from the criminal behavior of clergy against children to their wrath over the ordination of women. Neither option is terribly appealing.

Times change and with new information new opinions form, and if they are spiritually reasonable, the task for devotees is to support them with scriptural logic—sastra-yukti—or the logic that supports the essential conclusions of revelation.

His eccentric nature, his unkempt look and crazy brown cloth, his frustration with the status quo and his tendency to periodically boil over and without restraint speak in such a way as to be censured by authority. He was anything but a generic Hare Krishna devotee.