Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Channels Margaret Sanger

October 1, 2014|11:11 am

Thanks to US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a well-known liberal and feminist, Americans are getting an inside look at what Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's founder, probably would have embraced today and who she would have embraced today. From her recent comments on abortion, Justice Ginsburg would have been praised by Ms. Sanger for her comments on poor people and abortion.

The oldest female judge on the bench, Justice Ginsburg gave an interviewto fashion magazine Elle recently. In full context, here is the question and answer session on abortion:

[Elle:] Fifty years from now, which decisions in your tenure do you think will be the most significant?

[Justice Ginsburg:] Well, I think 50 years from now, people will not be able to understand Hobby Lobby. Oh, and I think on the issue of choice, one of the reasons, to be frank, that there's not so much pro-choice activity is that young women, including my daughter and my granddaughter, have grown up in a world where they know if they need an abortion, they can get it. Not that either one of them has had one, but it's comforting to know if they need it, they can get it.

The impact of all these restrictions is on poor women, because women who have means, if their state doesn't provide access, another state does. I think that the country will wake up and see that it can never go back to [abortions just] for women who can afford to travel to a neighboring state

[Elle:] When people realize that poor women are being disproportionately affected, that's when everyone will wake up? That seems very optimistic to me.

[Justice Ginsburg:] Yes, I think so. It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people. [emphasis mine]

Firstly, her assertion that many young women today aren't as actively pro-choice because they know they can get an abortion whenever they need to is at best, a good public relations spin on how outnumbered young pro-lifers are to young pro-choicers as noted by former NARAL president Nancy Keenan when she said of the March for Lifea couple years ago: "I just thought, my gosh, they are so young. There are so many of them, and they are so young." She cited the lack of involvement of young people in the pro-choice movement when she resigned.

Secondly, as to her point about the promotion of birth only among poor people as a default to their not being enough access to abortion for them Margaret Sanger would have been cheering Justice Ginsburg on.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Channels Margaret Sanger

Not a racist or a sexist, no sir, certainly not! [Pharyngula]

I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions.

In particular, I focused on someone named R.B. Kerr, who had at least a 25 year history of writing letters and articles for eugenics journals, and was also much concerned with the sexual habits of women. The earliest articles describe him as Canadian, but later he seems to have moved to Croydon; nowhere can I find any mention of his credentials or background, although I did find one picture of him circa 1907. He seems to have gradually evolved from a radical advocate of Free Love into a kind of Colonel Blimp character.

Heres R.B. Kerr in a letter to the Eugenics Review in 1933. Hes not a racist or anti-Semite, oh, no hes just defending Hitler.

SIR,I entirely agree with you in condemning Hitlers persecution of the Jews, but the reason you give seems to me fallacious. In your July issue you say:

Herr Hitler has still not realized, apparently, that in declaring that the small number of Jews in Germany have achieved an altogether disproportionate measure of successin the arts, sciences, and learned professionshe has publicly acknowledged their superiority to the bulk of the nation that wishes to get rid of them!

If you will read Hitlers book, Mein Kampf, you will find that he fully understands your argument, but does not agree with it. One of his principal charges against the Jews is that in literature and the arts they succeed by superficial and meretricious qualities, and not by first-rate work.

The distinction is familiar to every competent critic. Everybody knows the difference between a best-seller and a literary masterpiece. Edgar Wallace sold far better than John Galsworthy. Hall Caine left many times as much money as Thomas Hardy. Martin Tupper was beyond comparison a more successful poet than Robert Browning.

The same thing is true of all the arts. The greatest musical composers were pure Germans, but the works of the Jew Mendelssohn have sold far better than those of Bach and Beethoven. The greatest painters are hardly ever the most popular. I cannot speak with authority about science, but I have heard such contempt for scientific knights and newspaper scientists, that I strongly suspect that the same principle applies.

I do not know whether Hitler is correct in his remarks about the Jews. He does, however, make a distinction between value and success which would have the unanimous support of intelligent critics.

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Not a racist or a sexist, no sir, certainly not! [Pharyngula]

What Does Thom Tillis Want?

The Republican candidate for Senate from North Carolina has shown a remarkable knack for moving up in the ranks, but he seems less sure what to do once he gets there.

AP

Thom Tillis is a man in a hurry. He went from city councilor to North Carolina House speaker in just five years. Four months into his second term as speaker, he was running for U.S. Senate. The man who would hand the Republicans control of the Senate has been a lot of things in a short amount of time. And while he seems to know where hes going, its less clear that he knows what hell do once he gets there.

Tillis started his political career as a city councilor in Cornelius, a wealthy suburb of Charlotte. In 2006, after a single term, he upset a Republican incumbent in a primary for a state House seat. Like all freshmen, Tillis arrived in Raleigh as a backbencher, but he quickly impressed his Republican colleagues, who chose him freshman leader. In just his second term, he joined the House GOP leadership as minority whip.

Despite the drubbing Republicans took in North Carolina in 2008, Tillis saw an opportunity and took a gamble. In 2009, he left his job as a $500,000-a-year business consultant and worked tirelessly in the 2010 election to recruit and elect GOP candidates. Safe in his own seat, Tillis crisscrossed the state helping House candidates organize and raise money. The bet paid off when Republicans won control of the House in the 2010 landslide. Tillis impressed enough members and accrued enough favors that he was narrowly chosen speaker over House Minority Leader Skip Stam, a six-term veteran. The more socially conservative Stam became majority leader.

The Republican Establishment Strikes Back

The 2011 session of the legislature marked the first time in North Carolina in more than a century that Republicans controlled both houses of the General Assembly. Tillis arrived with ambition and a pocket full of political IOUs but few legislative accomplishments. And while previous speakers, both Democrat and Republican, brought years of experience and relationships to the job, Tillis had only two terms in the House and one in the GOP leadership.

In contrast, his Senate counterpart, President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, spent 10 years in the Senate watching his predecessor, Democrat Marc Basnight, run a disciplined and focused caucus. Berger understood both the formal and informal rules of the legislature and the dynamics that made it work. He also had a veto-proof majority, something Tillis lacked in the House. After six years of quickly climbing the political ladder, Tillis initially seemed to focus on passing legislation and maintaining peace in his caucus. He and Berger appeared to work well together. They held joint press conferences, and most of their legislative priorities aligned.

Tempered by Democratic Governor Bev Perdue and the House Democrats, Tillis and Berger pushed an agenda that would later seem modest. They ended a one-cent sales tax, put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban gay marriage, required counseling before an abortion, cut funding to public schools and universities, and implemented tort reform. Most importantly, they passed a gerrymandered redistricting map that ensured their electoral success in 2012.

If Tillis put his ambition on hold during the 2011 legislative session, it reappeared in 2012. This time, it caused problems within his caucus and with Berger. Both men were rumored to be looking at Democrat Kay Hagans U.S. Senate seat. The pair seemed to be staking out opposing political ground. In a state that had narrowly voted for Obama in 2008, Tillis tried to build his credentials as a moderate. He made compensation for victims of the states eugenics program his top legislative priority and supported a measure to expand gambling on the Cherokee reservation in western North Carolina. Members of his caucus publicly criticized him for not holding to conservative principles.

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What Does Thom Tillis Want?

A tale of two countries Jefferson Countys assault on U.S. history

This is a tale of two countries.

The first country was built on a radical new promise of human equality and a guarantee of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That country made it possible for even those born in the humblest and most meager circumstances to climb to the pinnacle of prosperity and achievement. It helped save the world in a great global conflagration, fed and rebuilt the devastated nations of Europe, planted the first footprints on another world.

The second country was built on the uncompensated labor of human beings owned from birth till death by other human beings. That country committed genocide against its indigenous people, fabricated a war in order to snatch territory belonging to its neighbor, put its own citizens in concentration camps. And it practiced the science of eugenics with such enthusiasm that it inspired advocates of mandatory sterilization and racial purity all over the world. One was an obscure German politician named Adolf Hitler.

Obviously, the first of those countries is America. But the second is, too.

This would not come as a surprise to any reasonably competent student of American history. But that is a category that soon may not include students in Jefferson County, Colo. The good news is, they are not taking it lying down.

To the contrary, hundreds of them staged mass walkouts from at least five area high schools last week. They chanted and held up signs in protest of a proposed directive from a newly elected conservative school-board member that would require teachers of history to promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system.

Teachers are further told to emphasize positive aspects of U.S. heritage and to avoid lessons that encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.

Like, say, the civil rights movement.

To the students credit, they recognized this for the act of intellectual vandalism it was and did a very American thing. They protested. As of late last week, the board was promising to revise the proposal, claiming it had been misunderstood.

Actually, it was understood all too well. One frequently sees these efforts to whitewash the ugliness out of American history. The state of Virginia was ridiculed in 2010 for a history book which falsely claimed thousands of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The state of Arizona passed a law that same year restricting ethnic studies classes under the theory that they tend to promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

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A tale of two countries Jefferson Countys assault on U.S. history

Colo. students protest intellectual vandalism

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This is a tale of two countries.

The first country was built on a radical new promise of human equality, and a guarantee of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That country made it possible for even those born in the humblest and most meager circumstances to climb to the pinnacle of prosperity and achievement.

It helped save the world in a great global conflagration, fed and rebuilt the devastated nations of Europe, planted the first footprints on another world.

The second country was built on the uncompensated labor of human beings owned from birth till death by other human beings. That country committed genocide against its indigenous people, fabricated a war in order to snatch territory belonging to its neighbor, put its own citizens in concentration camps.

And it practiced the science of eugenics with such enthusiasm that it inspired advocates of mandatory sterilization and racial purity all over the world. One was an obscure German politician named Adolf Hitler.

Obviously, the first of those countries is America. But the second is, too.

This would not come as a surprise to any reasonably competent student of American history. But that is a category that soon may not include students in Jefferson County, Colo. The good news is, they are not taking it lying down.

To the contrary, hundreds of them staged mass walkouts from at least five area high schools last week. They chanted and held up signs in protest of a proposed directive from a newly elected conservative school board member that would require teachers of history to promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system.

Teachers are further told to emphasize positive aspects of U.S. heritage and to avoid lessons that encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.

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Colo. students protest intellectual vandalism

Opinion: Remove punishments for incest

Ask your friends and relatives and intuitively most of them will be opposed to lifting punishments for incest. The taboo runs deep. It is rooted in history, experience, religion and tradition - if not in all, then at least in most cultures around the world.

But in nations as different as France, Russia, Turkey, Japan, Argentina, Ivory Coast and The Netherlands, sex between consenting adult siblings is not punished. The reason given: There are no victims.

Eugenics no reason for ban

But, your friends and relatives will cry out, there are potential victims!

The risk that children born from an incestuous relationship will be born physically handicapped is disproportionately high, they'll say. Taking an oversimplified view, that's true - but it's also true for the children of parents with certain hereditary diseases, or alcoholics, or pregnant women who are older than 40. They should all be banned from having sex!

The law isn't even based on eugenic concerns: sterilization doesn't change the statutory offense. The law that the ethics panel would like to see revised allows for all varieties of consensual sex.

Dagmar Engel heads DW's Berlin bureau

Yet, there is a lingering sense that such a change would be wrong. Wouldn't it violate moral values, or even destroy the family? A glance at the other countries - see the list above - and at scientific research puts things right. Doing away with the punishment doesn't mean the taboo disappears. The Westermarck effect - named after Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck - prevents siblings from falling in love with each other in droves. You don't find people you were raised with sexually attractive.

Taboo has strong roots

That is why so few cases answer to this part of Germany's criminal code. All available data shows that incest among siblings - and this is all this is all this is about - appears to be relatively rare in Western societies, according to the ethics panel. But the few adult siblings who do have sex have the same basic right to sexual self-determination and to the pursuit of happiness. So, toss the criminal law provision. The taboo will survive!

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Opinion: Remove punishments for incest

Cross Eras Dark Secret Resurfaces

When you hear about the governor who gave New Havens largest high school its name, you never hear about a state-commissioned report that would have carried out a Nazi-style ethnic cleansing campaign in Connecticut. One group in town says its time you did.

The secret 1938 report, prepared for the state by a pro-eugenics researcher with ties to Nazi Germany, called for mass sterilization and deportation based on a ranking of all Connecticut citizens by 21 classifications such as race descent, nativity and citizenship, and kin in institutions. Blacks, Jews, immigrants, the poor, and most of all people with physical deficiencies such as blindness and deafness, and people classified as mentally handicapped, would not fare well in that project.

The plan never became reality, although Connecticut did have a sterilization law, first enacted in 1909 and found to be constitutional by the state attorney general in 1912. Under the law the state sterilized 557 people classified as mentally handicapped or insane, up until 1963. (A woman could be classified as feeble-minded for having a child out of wedlock or a low IQ test score.)

Details about the secret report emerged in recent years due to the research of a prolific author about American institutional connections to Nazi-era crimes, named Edwin Black. His work caught the interest of the New Haven chapter of a group called the Society of Former Slaves and Freemen, which has begun circulating excerpts of Blacks writing on the subject. (The video captures an event the group held in New Haven this past weekend.)

Society organizer Linwood Branham Sr. (at center in photo at the top of this story) contacted the Independent to ask that the subject be raised with the broader community, to spark discussion about Wilbur Crosss role and how we should recognize it today, including whether to have the citys largest public high-school and the Wilbur Cross Parkway named after him. Yales alumni association also gives out an award in Crosss name. No word of the episode appears in official or widely read accounts of Crosss tenure in office, which focus instead on the opening of the parkway and his ascension to political office after a non-political career as a Yale English professor and literary critics.

Our forefathers did not always do the right thing. We have the obligation to set some things straight. The people will decide what to do about it, Branham said.

We have to be able to talk about these things. We have to heal and grow as a society. (Those interested in contacting the society about it can email Branham .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).)

A current Yale professor who specializes in eugenics research and has revisited some of the source material that forms the basis of Blacks work agreed that this was a disturbing episode in Connecticut history. He disagreed that evidence points to personal culpability by Cross.

What do you think? Lets start with Blacks argument.

Black, the son of Holocaust survivors, is a journalist who has written numerous books and spoken around the world about genocide and human rights. He has assembled teams of researchers to pore into untold stories about ties between, for instance, IBM and the Carnegie Institution and prominent American scholars with the emerging Nazi regime in the 1930s.

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Cross Eras Dark Secret Resurfaces

Marcus: Long-acting birth control could help stabilize the single parenthood trend

Imagine that all women in the United States, upon becoming sexually active, were automatically fitted with an intrauterine device or other form of long-acting birth control. This scenario sounds creepy, with its undertones of Big Brother and eugenics; framed this way, it would be neither a realistic nor a desirable development.

But this thought experiment, provoked by a new book by Brookings Institution scholar Isabel Sawhill, illuminates two important societal and technological realities.

First, as Sawhill describes in Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage, single parenthood is becoming the unhealthy new normal. Once, single parenthood was the consequence of divorce or the province of the poorest and least educated.

Now, divorce rates are edging down. The prevalence of single parenting is largely a function of the never-married. The average woman today has her first baby before she is married. Meanwhile, single parenthood is invading the ranks of the middle class, often involving children with multiple partners.

The stereotypical single mother used to be a high school dropout. No more. In 2010, Sawhill notes, 58percent of first births to those with high school diplomas or some college were out of wedlock. (The comparable figure for those with a college degree was just 12percent.)

The paradox of the growing rate of single parenthood is that teenage pregnancy and birth rates have plummeted since the 1990s. But 20-somethings are the new teens: Unwanted pregnancies soared in this cohort during that same period. Among single women under 30, about 70percent of pregnancies are unplanned; just under half of these pregnancies are carried to term.

The resulting children are the product of unstable relationships. In one study of 5,000 newborns in large and midsize U.S. cities, half the parents were living together at the time of birth; another third were dating. But by the time the children were age 5, only one-third of those couples were still together compared with 80percent of their married counterparts.

More disturbing, many of those single mothers went on to have additional children with other partners, introducing new layers of instability into their childrens already complicated lives.

Certainly, single parents can be dedicated and capable caregivers. Yet the broader trend toward single parenthood is undeniably bad for the children involved. If marriage rates returned to their level in 1970, according to Sawhills calculations, the rate of child poverty would be about 20percent lower.

Still, there is no reversing the inexorable trend against marriage. This acceptance reflects a shift for Sawhill, who just a couple of years ago was asserting that Dan Quayle was right when he criticized television character Murphy Brown for choosing unwed motherhood. Marriage, Sawhill argued then, should be celebrated as the best environment for raising children.

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Marcus: Long-acting birth control could help stabilize the single parenthood trend

Why Oh Why Can't We Have A Better Economist Corps?

It is an insufficiently remarked-upon fact that John Maynard Keynes was a vigorous and lifelong promoter of eugenics. Outside of the immorality of this position, it can be said to cast a pall on his entire work because, as Bryan Caplan noted, support for eugenics betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of one of the foundational doctrines of economics, which is the law of comparative advantage. A society where everyone was a genius would be worse off than a society with both geniuses and non-geniuses, because of comparative advantage. Societies thrive when people have complementary skillsets so that each person can do what theyre best at. Everyone contributes. Without non-geniuses, geniuses could not be geniuses.

A second prolegomenon: believe it or not, I dont dislike Brad DeLong. He and I had mostly pleasant conversations when he followed me on Twitter. I praised his health care plan (although I remain puzzled by his support for Obamacare, which takes Americas healthcare system in precisely the opposite direction).

Anyhoo

Frequent readers will know that one of my persistent worries is the worlds underpopulation, and our slowing population growth.

On Twitter, Tyler Cowen pointed to a new piece of research which suggests global population might not be slowing as much as we thought. As he noted, this is good for people like the economist Julian Simon and myself who believe that more population leads to more prosperity since, as Simon memorably put it, people are the ultimate resource.

This is what DeLong had to say in response:

One is at a loss as to what to say, exactly.

Obviously, there is, first, the casual prejudice. The implicit subtext is clearly that women who want >3 children are idjits part if idjit cultures where people do idjit things like, for example, believing in God.

Obviously, there is the self-evident fact that even if DeLongs premise were true,maybe their children would be tied into idea-generating network[s], whatever that means, which is, presumably, one of the things that is desired when it comes to population growth.

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Why Oh Why Can't We Have A Better Economist Corps?

BCB Live! Fluoride Action Conference Recap, Eugenics, IQ Destruction, Oh My! – Video


BCB Live! Fluoride Action Conference Recap, Eugenics, IQ Destruction, Oh My!
September 16, 2014 In today #39;s BCB we recap our recent visit to the 5th annual citizen #39;s conference on fluoridation which took place in Crystal City Virginia....

By: The Bull City Bulletin

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BCB Live! Fluoride Action Conference Recap, Eugenics, IQ Destruction, Oh My! - Video

'The Case Against the Supreme Court' pushes for reforms

Erwin Chemerinsky has made an exemplary career out of teaching, writing and lecturing about the U.S. Supreme Court. And though he has strongly liberal views, he is widely admired for his ability to explain the work of the court in a way that is thoughtful, clear and fair.

But in his new book, he says he regrets having painted "a generally favorable picture" of the court for generations of law students. "I discovered in my own mind I have been making excuses for the Court," says Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School. "The Supreme Court is not the institution that I once revered."

With the mission to set the record straight, he weighs the court's role in America's history and pronounces it a failure. Rather than stand up for "liberty and justice for all," the court has regularly stood with the powerful and against the weak. The justices have ruled for slave-holders, segregationists, corporate bosses and the very wealthy, he writes, and ignored the rights of workers, consumers, dissidents and the victims of government abuse.

He cites infamous cases and lesser-known abominations. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 struck down the "Missouri Compromise" and ruled former slaves could not be free even in the "free states" of the North. The Civil War soon followed. In 1927, the American eugenics movement got a boost when the revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes endorsed the forced sterilization of a supposedly "feeble minded white woman" from Virginia named Carrie Buck. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Holmes wrote in an opinion cited by the Nazis a decade later. And during World War II, as Americans fought overseas against the brutal racist policies of the Germans and Japanese, the Supreme Court upheld the mass detention of tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent on the West Coast.

And what about the Warren Court? Chemerinsky agrees the court of the 1950s and '60s is the great exception. It began with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared racial segregation unconstitutional. And in the years that followed, the liberal majority struck down poll taxes, wielded the "one person, one vote" rule to equalize political power in the states and breathed new life into the Constitution's protections for accused criminals.

"These three areas ending segregation, increasing equality in voting and expanding the rights of criminal defendants are unquestionably successes for the Supreme Court that made society better," he writes.

But the progressive court did not accomplish as much as it could have, he says. For one, it did little to enforce the desegregation of schools. And the progressive era did not last long. Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a "law and order" platform and blamed the liberal court for the rising tide of crime and violence in America's cities. He also replaced four justices in his first term. By the mid-1970s, the liberal era was over.

Since Nixon's election, the court has had three chief justices, all of them conservative Republicans. Warren Burger was Nixon's choice to replace Earl Warren. William Rehnquist, a Nixon appointee, was elevated by Ronald Reagan. And John Roberts, a former Rehnquist clerk, was chosen by George W. Bush.

When Chemerinsky turns to the Roberts Court, he shows its leanings are in line with much of what has come before. In recent years, the court has blocked lawsuits against corporations and high government officials and struck down campaign-funding laws so as to give corporations and the wealthy more freedom to use money to sway elections. It voided a key part of the Voting Rights Act and barred about 1.6-million women employees from suing Wal-Mart for unequal pay.

Chemerinsky concedes he will be accused of "liberal whining." And conservatives will note he has little to say about disputed decisions such as the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion or the more recent gay-rights rulings.

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'The Case Against the Supreme Court' pushes for reforms