This morning I arose and waded through a bevy of fallen leaves and it was glorious.

     On the Peace Menu today is another rant directed towards my least favorite disfigurer of the floundering Culture of Life: Margaret Sanger.  However before I launch into that dear pastime (the shooting of the sitting duck, or the fish in the barrel), I would like to send out a supremely appreciative thank you to my dearest Becky for fixing Latoya (that is my MacBooks’s name) for me.  Miss Becky has magic fingers, and has taught me that in order to gain Latoya’s respect, I need to learn to stroke her keys, and refrain from all derogatory remarks directed at her screen.  Well Becky, I will try, but I make no promises.

     A week ago my bioethics class sat through a lengthy documentary that exposed the horrors of what was called the "Lynchburg Project”—a eugenics movement of the early 20th century.  This Lynchburg Project, a hideously embarrassing smudge on the conscience of the Virginia State Government, was a movement of forced sterilization for people the state declared to be unfit to reproduce.  In the documentary they went on further to defame many leaders and high profiles of the time (like Oliver Wendell Holmes) who had been swept away with enthusiasm for the concept of creating a perfect race.  The whole time I’m watching this video, I’m waiting, just waiting, for the documentary to mention another fierce eugenics advocate and darling of the American people, Madame Margaret Sanger.  Unsurprisingly, her name never showed up.  The fact that the founder of the enormously powerful, vastly extolled organization Planned Parenthood was a shameless eugenicist and racist who held Nazi-like ideals is scandalously kept hush-hush.  That prominent piece of her history has been strategically erased from Sanger’s life story, and she is unjustly remembered as a hero, a superwoman far ahead of her time. 

The very slogan she tacked onto her pet organization (Planned Parenthood) says it all.  It ran, “Creating a Race of Thoroughbreds”.  Eugenics wasn’t just a side hobby for Sanger—it represents the very essence, the core of her concept and propagation of birth control.  In her own words (this woman has so many blatant, revealing statements), she would use Birth Control to eliminate “the dead weight of human waste”.  She mourned the fact that medical technology of the day was wasted by keeping the weak and sickly alive to procreate.  She did everything in her power to prevent fertility of the physically and mentally defective, and wrote off anything else as pathetic “sentimentalism”.  To the humane Miss Sanger, the greatest achievement of her Birth Control campaign would be to stop morons and imbeciles (her choice of vocabulary, not mine) from having children.  Eugenics with a vengeance was the name of her creepy little game.  “We prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feebleminded."  Margaret can also add the title “racist” to her impressive resume.  She harbored a bitter hatred for minority groups, and hoped to get African-American Ministers to preach to the Churches’ black communities about her abortion movements in order to eliminate these people she disgustingly considered “socially undesirable people”. The lady of the hour herself said: "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Now if this is the best hero for women we can come up with, I wave my white flag and surrender all hope. 

     I read something of Flannery O’Connor’s once, and she said something I’ll never forget: “The truth doesn’t change according to our ability to stomach it”.  If we think the Nazi-mentality of eugenics is a thing of the past, we have a sickeningly bitter pill to swallow.  Even though we have rewritten Margaret Sanger’s biography, her ideals remain an inescapable fixture lurking at the center of her precious Birth Control movement.  If Miss Sanger, eugenicist and racist extraordinaire, were to make a visit back to the world, I’m sure she would be positively giddy at all the new manifestations of her eugenic ideology that she would find.  Our society of abortion, contraception, forced sterilization, euthanasia, ethnic hatred, animosity towards God and religion, Reprogenics (manipulating qualities in the baby, like sex selection, blood type, abiliity or looks in order to create 'designer children'), and countless other aspects of life as we know it would have Margaret Sanger's stamp of hearty approval.  That’s a comforting thought, isn’t it?

Comments

[Sputnick]

Wow Courtney
You truly are an inspiration. I love how you fight for what you believe in.Yet even in defending your beliefs you remain so eloquent in your writing. As I told u last time it has been 3 months since I have been on myspace.Sounds like college life is a bit crazzzzzzy!!I miss you and your lil sistas.I hope to see you at the Nutcracker.You can tell me about all the hotties you have been chillen with and I can talk about all the hotties I want to chill with namely Brad Pitt, but I guess he's taken.I gotta go TP/sign my crush's house to convert him to be conservative.Luv ya your boo Sputnick aka Katherine Beard

[Magnus]

That makes me sick to my stomach! Your write piercingly, with just the right amount of humility. In the last sentence you tremble a little too much for me to jump up and rattle my machinegun, but I can still imagine you standing in front of a large podium, splitting the air with an outstretched arm, and inciting people to tear something down.

[Peace Be Still]

Sputnick come back to ballet! WE MISS YOU XO