Abortion

because stirring the pot is fun

By J. L. Bastiat ⋅ June 27, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Responding to the ongoing lionization of Margaret Sanger by the organization she founded to carry out her preferred policies, we get the following excerpt from Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg on NRO:

Sanger [ . . . ] brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were. This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish “individualism” among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger’s analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect “bought off” women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the above-mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes…is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”

A letter-writer replies to Goldberg’s damning (and not new: I read this data first in a Pat Buchanan column more than fifteen years ago, and no one is pretending this is a shocker; it’s just very carefully suppressed) with the inspired argument that Helen Keller, former Justice Holmes, and a wide array of prominent figures were no better.

Well, uh, actually…yes. Now, not all of the figures the letter-writer names were equally rapacious, or equally successful, but beyond a doubt the dominant policy voices up to World War II were almost uniformly eugenicist upper-class white liberals, otherwise known as Progressives. They were also usually men with some serious libidinal blockages, which is where having brilliant players of the game like the murderous Sanger and the Communist Keller came in so handy.

Oh, Jonah’s response could be summed up in a word: “duh!“