Mary Martin on "majority wins" language issues

Oh my goodness.

While I usually agree with Mary Martin over at AnimalPerson, I really can’t get behind her latest, and to my mind, entirely dismissive take on the very real differences between the abolitionist approach and folks promoting what I’ve come to call (trying to be as non-pejorative as possible, here) “interim welfarists.”

These are very real, very significant differences, and they don’t really center on who should call themselves x.

This is a fundamental philosophical divide in the movement that completely transcends individual self-definitions, and is vastly more important than the claim that this is mere “linguistic squabbling.”

It goes deeper than which group of persons has the “right” to use the abolitionist label. The issue is that the abolitionist approach has a very clearly defined underlying first principle: we reject ANY welfare regulation, whether or not people may think that such a regulationist approach will “eventually” lead to animal rights, because the fundamental issue is USE and not just treatment.

We’re making a case that ALL USE is wrong; if you’re saying that “some use” is acceptable “in the meantime” or that “better treatment in the meantime” is your personal position, that’s fine; I disagree with that on practical and moral grounds, but you can advocate for whatever makes you happy.
But you can not reasonably call that an abolitionist position when the abolitionist position on this is both clearly defined and explicitly rejects that approach.

Just as you cannot reasonably claim to be a vegan who eats flesh, you cannot reasonably claim to be a “welfare abolitionist.”