Myth #58: “But eating animals is legal.”
Not that long ago in the United States, it was legal for an African-American to be owned by a white American … Not that long ago in the United States, it was legal for married women to be sexually subjugated by their husbands and for all women seen as legally “inferior” to all men … Not that long ago in the United States, it was illegal for homosexuals to marry the ones they loved. Indeed, it is still illegal to do so in some states today. And not that long ago, it was perfectly legal for the British to commit horrendous atrocities in Gandhi’s colonial India, and for the followers of Hitler to perpetrate even worse atrocities on innocent Jews before & during World War II.
My Friends, it hopefully goes almost without saying that just because something is deemed “legal”, doesn’t come close to making it moral or right … For anyone to treat living, breathing, feeling, self-aware animals as mere pieces of property is a blatant form of discrimination — one just as immoral & just as unjust as any other form of bigotry. Indeed, the inevitably massive social response to moral hypocrisy has been the ultimate downfall of every unjust system of government in human history, and unless we choose to make our systems of justice equitable & unconditional, a similar uprising will be the ultimate downfall of ours as well. No legal system has any semblance of real credibility until it extends to all its sentient subjects the same fundamental rights that it extends to its privileged ones.
In essence, that it is currently legal to be callous & cruel & murderous towards animals does NOT prove that such perversions are acceptable, my Friends … It merely shows that the laws allowing such behaviors are themselves perverted.
Current status of this Myth: Mitigated
Justification it provides for eating animals: NONE
“How does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; Stalinist, Nazi and Maoist purges were all legal. As such, quite clearly the fact of legality does not justify such crimes. Indeed, legality alone cannot be the talisman of truly moral people.” ~ inspired by Walter E. Williams
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