A core tenant, perhaps the core tenant, of veganism is that animals have a moral worth comparable to that of humans and that we have similar moral responsibilities toward them that we do to other people. When a carnist tries to tell you that you’re not allowed to compare animal oppression to human oppression, they are demanding that you implicitly accept the carnist view: that animals are inferior and lesser beings, and therefore we can brutalize and kill them without compunction. The comparison between animal oppression and human oppression is only degrading to humans if you start with this premise.
It has nothing to do with being considerate to marginalized people (as they claim) and everything to do with creating a left-sounding justification to make your views verboten. If you are a minority discussing your own experience as a marginalized person in relation to animal oppression, carnists will try to dictate how you’re allowed to talk about your oppression and use your solidarity with animals to get you into trouble. I have experienced this firsthand. They’ll happily silence you in this manner because, for them, their concern was never with marginalized people - it was with their perceived right to not only enable the endless horrors of carnism, but to never be made the slightest bit uncomfortable about them.
People love to say that such comparisons undermine just how bad human oppression is, but what’s actually going on is the inverse.
Carnists trivialize the oppression of non-human animals so much that they think that a pig being forced into a gas chamber is something more to shrug your shoulders at than it is to compare to a human being forced into a gas chamber.
It’s honestly quite sickening.
“Did anyone ever tell you… plants can feel pain too?”
“Vegans kill fewer plants because most crops are grown to feed livestock rather than humans.”
NOOOO you’re supposed to collapse under the weight of my logic and reason and see all forms of suffering as equally bad therefore all suffering is equally worth ignoring let people enjoy things to each their own
These are folks using the same tokenizing logic that liberals use to cynically weaponize identity. “As an [X] woman I actually feel safer when cops are around” as if this invalidates the logic against policing, let alone the 5 other [X] women that disagree with that person.
And for basically every way you can slice up identity, veganism is more popular in the marginalized portions.
This kind of weaponized tokenizing doesn’t just extend to these two topics, either. Self-elected “speakers in behalf if the [X] community” are everywhere and it is very common to find them supporting harmful status quos. Or supporting something that is fine but pushing back against effective but “impolite” means of advocacy.
