You’ll have to scroll down past the main column, down to the “Question’s We’re Still Thinking About.”
IMHO, a vegan who swallows semen is NOT cheating, for this reason: vegan moms nurse their babies. Since human milk is a human-produced “animal product” (so to speak), then it stands to reason that semen is as well. Since mama’s milk is not off-limits, then neither should semen be.
I have heard anecdotes of vegans eating their own placentas with the justification that it never had a face, no life was lost, and it was given with free consent. That would satisfy the moral objections. All of those arguments could be applied to semen as well.
I know that for at least some vegans, milk itself is not off-limits, but rather is avoided because of the close connection between the dairy and beef industries (or meat from other milk-producing animals) and so there’d definitely be nothing wrong with swallowing semen.
Yes, they are vegans, Dersk. It’s more of a hypothetical situation than a practical one though, because in practice you’re not going to find milk coming from a non-exploited animal. My point is that it’s not the milk itself that’s forbidden by veganism; it’s the manner in which it’s obtained. Milk obtained from a wild animal that voluntarily provided the milk (think “Remus and Romulus” maybe) would be just fine for a vegan to consume.
Since the beast providing the semen presumably did so of his own free will and without exploitation, there’s nothing wrong with a vegan consuming it. Ditto for breast milk, as others have pointed out.
Vegans who consume milk of domestic animals are typically called lacto-vegetarians. I’ve met Hindus who will consume dairy products but not eggs, due to their religious beliefs.
Holy smoke! There’s a book on veganism? When did that happen?
However, using Amazon’s search within the book feature, I can’t find the words Second International Vegan Assembly. Or wild animal. Or exploited. Or voluntarily. Or Romulus or Remus.
So even beyond the obvious that no two vegans agree on much of anything, and the fact that I’ve never heard any other vegan ever make a statement remotely resembling yours, your cite is a lousy one. Try again.
Google it. “Alpha Lyrae” is an alternate name for the star Vega, so saying that there was an offshoot heretical group of Vegans that called themselves “Alpha Lyraens” is a bit of nerd humor…
…which apparently nobody except me thinks is funny. So nevermind.