Pro-Life, Pro-Animal | The conscience of a pro-life, vegan conservative | National Review
Pro-Life, Pro-Animal | The conscience of a pro-life, vegan conservative | National Review
In 20 or so years of political speechwriting, the only condition I have ever set down in advance of being hired is that I would never, under any circumstances, assist any candidate or officeholder …
While I'm not pro-life, I think this is a fascinating - and eloquent - discussion of an obvious point: if you oppose abortion because it ends an "innocent life" that has never been conscious or sapient, how much more should you oppose the torture, execution, and consumption of beings that are not only innocent but also conscious and sapient?
Pro-life conservatives should be vegan if they want to be morally consistent.
So should everyone else.
1Pro-life conservatives should be vegan if they want to be morally consistent.
US conservatives have no hope of being morally consistent on that. The problem is they are not actually #proLife in the slightest (apart from abortion). To be clear, in the US context we are talking about a group that:
- opposes gun control
- opposes welfare
- opposes immigration and pushes xenophobic border control
- opposes public healthcare
- opposes social security
- opposes environmental regulation
- denies climate change (thus opposes actions to mitigate animal extinction and save human lives)
- opposed masks & vaccinations during a pandemic
- opposes worker’s rights (min. wage)
- endorses Citizens United (thus giving corporations an upper hand over human beings)
- generally supports the military industrial complex and weapons production
- endorses factory farming and meat consumption
You cannot have those positions that are antithetical to life and call yourself “pro-life”. If you are in the above group but also oppose abortion, then you are simply pro-forced-birth. So flipping a conservative on the last bullet is negligible in an effort to get pro-life consistency. They would have at least ~10 more positions to flip on before they could assert pro-life consistency.
2I think you mean "sentient". I don't think we have any reason to believe animals are sapient, nor should it have any bearing on their moral value.
0Nope. I said sapient, and I mean sapient. The animals we typically raise for food - cows, pigs, sheep, chickens - are conscious, intelligent beings capable of reasoning and decision making.
You are correct that all sentient life has moral value and deserves respect, but let's not downgrade the sapience of our livestock species and the moral horror of their treatment.
2