Not quite sure what the SCOPE of this discussion is from the OPost.. But I know -- it's getting too personally contentious to moderate in the CDZ.. Several of you are about to kicked out..
If you get a post deletion warning -- note that mod staff will be SITTING on this thread to MAKE it CDZ compliant.. So stay close to topic and away from personal exchanges while I figur
I don't see a lesser evil here vis a vis "forced sterilization" and abortion targeted at the poor and unfit. In fact, sterilization is a far GREATER pre-emptive and EVIL plan...
Part of the hissing and booing here is separating EUGENICS from RACISM.. ENTIRELY possible that Sanger was NOT a racist.. Might be quite color blind in fact.. But focused like a laser on "purifying the gene pool" like all the eugenicists around the world were..
So -- to get that subtle distinction, I went to my reliable leftist progressive source "The Nation" for a read on this.. Piece was written in response to taking Sanger's name off of a couple PP large clinics in NY...
Canceling Margaret Sanger Only Helps Abortion Opponents
When Planned Parenthood took the name of the organization’s founder off its flagship clinic in Manhattan, they bought into anti-choice propaganda.www.thenation.com
Although she did not single out Black people, Sanger was, yes, a eugenicist. She thought people, especially poor people, often had too many kids to care for properly and that too many of those kids were born physically disabled (or in the language of the day, “feeble-minded”). She did not oppose forced sterilization.
In these views, she had a lot of company. Many intellectuals in the early 20th century—left, right, and center—went even further. That is, they traced social ills like crime and poverty to there being too many of the wrong sort of people, a calamity that modern society, through science and social control, could prevent. Because of the Nazis, we think of eugenics as based on racism and pseudoscientific notions of breeding a racial genetic elite, but it was more about ableism, based on the belief that poverty, crime, prostitution, and promiscuity were the result of inferior genes.
Avowed socialists like H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and even Helen Keller were eugenicists. So were liberal reformers like Havelock Ellis and John Maynard Keynes and traditionalists like Winston Churchill. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, the architects of the Swedish welfare state (she was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, too), supported measures to help mothers and children, but they also enthusiastically supported sterilization of the “unfit.” Buck v. Bell, the infamous Supreme Court decision that validated forced sterilization, was written by one liberal hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and approved by another, Louis Brandeis. As Chesler tartly observed, Sanger’s name is more closely associated with this case than the men who decided it. Nobody is demanding that Brandeis University change its name.
Dont know what arguing the diff between forced sterilization and abortion targeted at poor communities are gonna get ya... Also don't see a future in arguing over PP was founded in "racism"... The FACTS about eugenics are evil enough.. But SOMEHOW -- "Progressive" is the new left mantle.. The Dems have an AWFUL habit of branding themselves with names out of the hell section of history...
Progressive has nothing to do with eugenics...not sure how that was derived. Sanger was a product of her era, who personally saw what many poor women with too many children had to suffer. In many ways, the demonizing of her is a lot like the demonizing of some our founding figures because they were also slave owners. Demonizing might not be the right word, but it will do. You have to judge the person in the context of their times, and what tbey contributed. Sanger saw birth control as a way for poor women to get themselves out of poverty by limiting the number of children they had.
Eugenics was very prevalent in her era. But since the Left has sought to cancel the Founders by tearing down their statutes and diminishing their legacy, the Right is now canceling Margaret Sanger using the same tactics.
You can say it's unfair, and it probably is, but once the Left went down that road, this is what follows.
Your point would be valid...except for one thing. Timing. The right has been "canceling" Sanger for YEARS now. Long before the move to remove statues.
Ditto the Founders. Cancelled for years.
