The conversation about abortion and other reproductive health care in the country is missing something: people with disabilities.

Since it became clear the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, disability rights advocates say the uproar over allowing states to ban or restrict abortion has largely overlooked the ways people with disabilities will suffer. At least 12.7% of the U.S. population lives with disabilities including from speech and limb differences, mobile disabilities and developmental disabilities as of 2019, according to census data.

I think one of the reasons that disabled people are not centered in these conversations, even though we should be, is that typically disabled people are de-sexualized, said Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People With Disabilities (AAPD). We are not seen as sexual beings. In fact, the assumption is that we just dont have sex when, in reality, disabled people do have sex. We need and deserve accessible, affordable reproductive and informed reproductive health care, and that includes abortion.

Even after years of highlighting the longstanding lack of access to reproductive care, people with disabilities are still less likely to have health care providers and routine check-ups, and are more likely to have unmet health care needs because of the cost, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Access to reproductive services is even slimmer.

You may need an additional support person for physical access or to provide mental health support, said Town, who has cerebral palsy and uses mobility devices. For states that have banned abortion and people are talking about needing to travel out of state or use telehealth services, many telehealth platforms are not accessible to people with disabilities. These are all barriers to health care. Accessibility of reproductive health care can be a huge challenge.

People with disabilities are more likely to live in poverty than those without and often rely on state insurance programs like Medicaid to meet health care needs, according to the DC Abortion Fund, a nonprofit group that helps low-income people pay for abortions. However, only 15 states and Washington, D.C., cover abortions through Medicaid, a significant financial barrier to abortion access for people with disabilities.

For example, West Virginia, which has the largest population of disabled people in the country, according to census data, solely provides state funds for abortions in cases of life endangerment and fetal impairment. An analysis by the National Partnership for Women and Families found that abortion bans in the 26 states that are certain or likely to ban abortion could affect up to 2.8 million women with disabilities (53 percent of all such women in the U.S.).

Since the Supreme Courts ruling, disability rights groups like the AAPD and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund have condemned the Supreme Courts action, detailing the myriad ways people with disabilities will be affected by the decision and calling out ableism in the national conversation about reproductive justice. Black people bear the brunt of this injustice. About 1 in 4 Black adults in the country have a disability, compared with 1 in 5 white Americans, according to the CDC. And about 36% of Black people with disabilities live in poverty, compared with 26% of Americas overall disabled population.

Abortion advocates need to stop saying that the main reason to want abortion is to not have a disabled child, disability rights advocate Imani Barbarin said. Theres nothing like entering a space and the only reason they want access to this medical procedure is to not have somebody like you in their life. This is turning away tons of pro-abortion advocates who have disabilities.

People with disabilities across the country have reported experiences with health care providers that left them feeling discriminated against and concerned about the quality of care theyd receive. In a study by the National Research Center for Parents with Disabilities, one doctor jokingly asked a woman with a physical disability if she used a turkey baster to get pregnant, another refused to touch a pregnant womans amputated leg to help her push during labor, and one nurse remarked to another woman that it was wonderful that somebody like [her] would still want to have a kid.

And the marginalized group fares no better when it comes to terminating a pregnancy. A New York woman recently told The New York Times that Planned Parenthood of Greater New York canceled her abortion appointment, telling her, We dont do procedures for people in a wheelchair. (Planned Parenthood officials later apologized and said the womans appointment had been mismanaged.)

But the challenges of reproductive care dont start at pregnancy, Town said people with disabilities experience unfair treatment from the time they are young.

Procedures like pap smears are not inherently accessible to me, Town said. In the broader reproductive health care space, many disabled people are sterilized forcibly. And if theyre not sterilized, theyre placed on birth control or other forms of contraception without their consent. That happened to me as a young girl. Not for any health-related reasons, but so I was easier to care for.

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, founder of the disability rights grassroots organization Project LETS, who is nonbinary and uses they and she pronouns, said they had an abortion in 2020 months after giving birth to a daughter. Kaufman-Mthimkhulu has Congenital Myasthenic Syndrome (CMS), a disorder that has an underlying defect in the transmission of signals from nerve cells to muscles. Kaufman-Mthimkhulu said they sometimes use a wheelchair. They also have autism and endure chronic pain in their ankle and spine as a result of multiple surgeries, they said.

As a result, their body had negative reactions to being pregnant and their pregnancy was labeled high risk as a result of their disabilities Pregnancy exacerbated my current pain and health issues, and created new issues. I was constantly in severe pain, and former tools like medical marijuana were no longer accessible to me, Kaufman-Mthimkhulu said.

Research shows that people with disabilities get pregnant at similar rates to those without, but are more likely to experience blood clotting, hemorrhaging and infection during pregnancy, according to research published in the Disability and Health Journal. They also often receive inadequate health care and are at significantly higher risk of dying from pregnancy and childbirth, the research showed.

Kaufman-Mthimkhulu said in the wake of Roe being overturnedruling, Project LETS is working to develop political education sessions to both teach the public about the connection between reproductive and disability rights and strengthen mutual aid networks to support people with disabilities who need access to abortion, medication and other reproductive necessities. She said one key to fighting back against abortion restrictions for people with disabilities will be to strengthen systems that allow people with disabilities to give birth outside of traditional medical environments.

For instance, the organization is working with doulas and birth workers to create care networks for people outside of the traditional health care system, she said. This is important as people with disabilities navigate a system that doesnt always tend to their needs. Pregnancy put my physical body through hell, and mental, spiritual and emotional stability was significantly destabilized to a point that I dont believe has recovered.

But harshly restricted access to care wont be the only consequence of overturning Roe. Barbarin said organizations must prioritize making sure people with disabilities have access to their necessary medications moving forward.

So many disabled peoples medications have ended because theyre abortifacients, Barbarin said, referring to substances that induce abortion. So people who are on certain lupus and cancer drugs have had them stopped immediately.

One example of this is the drug Methotrexate, which is used to treat several types of cancer like leukemia and lymphoma and various diseases like lupus and Crohns disease. It is also an abortifacient, often used to treat ectopic pregnancies. The Lupus Foundation of America this month acknowledged reports of people having trouble accessing the drug since the Supreme Court ruling.

We need not just people who are reproductive advocates, we need people who are medical advocates for people with disabilities. I really want people to understand that, if you want to talk about intersectionality, you need to get disabled people their meds.

Barbarin, Town and Kaufman-Mthimkhulu agree that proper sex education is necessary for a future where people with disabilities have unlimited access to reproductive care. Up to 36 states dont include the needs and challenges of youth with disabilities in their sex education requirements or provide resources for accessible sex education, according to a 2021 report from the nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. And of those that do, only three explicitly include the group in their sex education mandates.

As the nation gears up for life without federal abortion protection, disability rights groups are prioritizing community care, medication and education for people with disabilities. Even with all these efforts, they say, its important to move away from ableist rhetoric that only further marginalizes people with disabilities.

Often times, disabled folks are used as scapegoats for pro-life arguments. Like, Look at all of these babies labeled with prenatal abnormalities that are aborted! Kaufman-Mthimkhulu said.

While its true that we must interrogate the ableism that leads to many disabled fetuses being aborted, disabled folks are not to be used as props to support harmful pro-life policies. We are not your pro-life scapegoats, and eugenics has no place in abortion access.

CORRECTION (July 25, 2022, 10:57 a.m. ET) : A previous version of this article misstated the diagnosis of Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu. She has been diagnosed with Congenital Myasthenic Syndrome, not Lambert-Eaton Myasthenic Syndrome.

The rest is here:

Disability rights groups are fighting for abortion access and against ableism - NBC News

Paul Campos writes, It should be considered journalistic malpractice to use the phrase Christian nationalism and not precede it with the adjective white.'

This is certainly true here in America, where Christian nationalism in one form or another is older than the nation itself. And every one of those forms of American Christian nationalism from Bradford to Barton has involved explicit white nationalism. It has been ever thus, ever since the good Christian Puritans of Massachusetts piously walked past the severed head of Metacomet on their way to church (for 20 years).

Scratch any American form of Christian nationalism and youll find white nationalism. And you wont have to scratch very hard.

Campos wrote that at the end of a profile of longtime Neo-Confederate John Bircher Michael Peroutka, who just secured the Republican nomination as the GOPs candidate for state Attorney General in Maryland.

In 1911, President Teddy Roosevelt sent a long-winded letter to the Rev. Franklin Smith, decrying Smiths advocacy for family planning. Roosevelt wasted a lot of ink on that letter, considering his whole argument could easily have been summed up in 14 words:

To advocate artificially keeping families small, with its inevitable attendants of pre-natal infanticide, of abortion, with its pandering to self-indulgence, its shirking of duties, and its enervation of character, is quite as immoral as to advocate theft or prostitution, and is even more hurtful in its folly, from the standpoint of the ultimate welfare of the race and the nation. You say that your ministry lies among well-to-do people; that is, among people of means and upper-class workers. I assume that you regard these people as desirable elements in the state. Can you not see that if they have an insufficient quantity of children, then the increase must come from the less desirable classes?

Roosevelt also was concerned about how progressive religious journalism was covering his fear of fewer white children being born, complaining: To me the most horrifying part of this movement is to find nominally religious journals like theIndependentcontaining articles by women and clergymen, apologizing for and defending a theory of conduct which, if adopted, would mean the speedy collapse of this republic and of western civilization. The action of theIndependentin this matter was a scandalous offense against good morals and a cause of shame to men of real religious feeling.

Thats from Rick Pidcocks Baptist News Global piece, Theres a straight line from eugenics to biblical family values to white supremacy and the anti-abortion movement.

And its not even the ugliest part of the history Pidcock traces. Thats probably the bits he cites from Margaret Farleys recent discussion of The Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values. Heres a longer chunk of that piece, with Farleys original links included:

One positive eugenicist who particularly shaped religious conservatives was Californian Paul Popenoe, a central figure in my recent book,The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt. Popenoe had been one of the most prolificadvocatesfor the segregation and forced sterilization of people whom he deemed to be waste humanity, eveninspiringleaders of the Third Reich before the time came for him to rebrand as a defender of patriarchal, procreative marriage. In 1930, Popenoe, an atheist,openedthe American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR) in Los Angeles to improve marital harmony and remove what he thought to be obstacles to white reproduction, such as rape, masturbation, pornography, female frigidity, and feminist yearnings. Over the next several decades, Popenoe counseled white couples on the importance of strict gender-norms and same-race marriage,trainingpsychologists, clergymen (many Baptist and Mormon), and youth group leadershis new allies in the racial betterment projectto do the same. According to Hilde Lvdal Stephens, author ofFamily Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Familys Crusade for the Christian Home, heinstructedcounselors to use heredity and interpersonal compatibility as codes for race, especially when his views on race began togoout of vogue.

Popenoeencouragedwomen to make themselves sexy for their husbands,letdomestic violence slide, and look out for their mans ego and sexual needs. Knowing that some women were sexually reticent, hehiredDr. Arnold Kegel to develop a treatment. (Kegels were born.) Popenoeexploredmethods to suppress homosexual desire, such as electroshock therapy, though its not clear if his institute ever used this technology. The mandubbedMr. Marriage also gave considerable attention to clients temperaments. One of his first-generation eugenics colleagues, Roswell Johnson, abetted these efforts. Johnson, whod previously crafted intelligence tests to identify and weed out the feebleminded,developedan extensive personality test for assessing compatibility, an adaptation of which is popularlyusedby Christian marriage experts today.

You thought purity culture was just about saving your virginity for marriage? It arose from, and remains deeply entangled with, securing the existence of white supremacy.

Pidcock revisits the baby-bust panic that ensued once TPTB realized how small Generation X was compared to its predecessors. The record-breaking baby boom of the Millennial generation didnt calm those fears any more than it stopped people from pretending that Social Security is going to go bankrupt. Hence the current wave of advocacy for breeding our way back to uncontested white supremacy (something Pidcock hears in the natalist cheerleading now coming from Kevin DeYoung, John MacArthur and others).

Roe v. Wade is gone. Buck v. Bell is making a comeback. After all, it is, as Pidcock shows us, deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the United States.

On the subject of white Christian eugenics, I came across the following while reading about the clash between Ida B. Wells and the Womens Christian Temperance Union. This is Frances Willard, president of the WCTU, in an interview with the New York paper The Voice in 1890: The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog shop is its centre of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.

That sure sounds like this Good White Christian lady wanted to eliminate more than just alcohol.

The link above, by the way, goes to an exhibit from the Frances Willard House Museum examining her racist statements and her initial reluctance to speak out against lynching. Its a good antidote to the white-right freakout du jour about Monticello: In trying to build a truly national organization only two decades after the Civil War, Willard compromised with white womens racism. How and why that happened can help us understand the larger story of racism in American womens movementsand American history in general.

CBN, bless their hearts, titled this piece Witches, Satanists, and Warlocks: Meet the Pastors Who Boldly Shared the Gospel for a Decade in Salem, Mass.

Translated from the kayfabe, that should read White evangelical performers answer casting call for tourism industry that fuels local economy. It seems to have been a win-win for the church-planters, who piggy-backed on the promotional acumen of the towns new tradition of cashing in on its infamous history. They committed to the bit by, among other things, moving in next door to Salems official witch.

Sometimes I miss theater.

The title for this post comes from Martina McBrides Independence Day. It may seem that Im a few weeks late in posting that song, but I think maybe a song about realizing that the only way to protect your daughters life is to burn everything down is pretty much right on time. Heres McBride singing this with Pat Benatar:

Originally posted here:

I ain't saying it's right or it's wrong - Patheos

Are we nothing more than a sum of our parts? As we make our way through the changes in society that I have mentioned in previous articles, we see how changes in the broader society that we wouldnt normally connect to considerations of personhood do in fact connect to them. Before we can understand how to respond to these changes, we must first understand what they are and where they came from.

The commoditization of man is the gradual movement from man having innate value just because of who he is to being looked at more and more simply as having value due to the goods that one can get from him. With the mechanization of man, that commoditization is gradually joined by a continued degradation of the worth of man, now seeing the time and labor of man as the commodity, buying it for the bottom dollar possible. Effectively, man is seen simply as a cog in a great machine meant to make the man at the top rich, whether or not the product being made has any quality or worth to it.

With the metallization of man, the previous two effects, the commoditization of man and the mechanization of man, are then joined by the growth of a view of man as being nothing more than a collection of parts (i.e., a biological machine) rather than a person with innate value.

The growth of this view found its source not only in the treatment of man in his newer, more modern workplaces, and the changes that resulted in his view of himself and others, but it also came from great discoveries in science. As medical science has grown, it has been discovered just how complex the human body actually is. There are innumerable parts working together in order to make the body work, much like the gears in a clock but far more complex. The closer one looked, the more parts and interactive systems one found.

At the same time, as magnification technology gradually grew in effectiveness, scientists began to see more and more what made up the basic materials of the parts, moving from molecules, to atoms, and beyond. Not only did these discoveries show the incredible complexity of the systems of the human body and what makes it up, but they also led to incredible leaps in technology, both in the technological and the biological. More and more, the alteration of the basic biological structures of man, and the fusion of man and machine, things that had only previously been considered seriously by science-fiction writers, began to seem within the grasp of those who could use that knowledge.

The insights that came with this information led to some incredible good for humanity. Surgical techniques that could repair damage that until now would have killed someone were developed, at times developing far enough to lead to outpatient procedures with minimal recovery times. Medicines were developed that could both treat and cure infections from bacteria and viruses, along with various poisonous substances, vastly decreasing the mortality rate from these things.

Along with the surgical techniques and medications that were developed, technological solutions have gradually been developed that allow for the replacement of damaged or lost body parts, whether it is with an organ from a pig or a machine shop. These things, ongoing in their development right now, have led both to longer lifespans and to higher quality of life for those who are having those longer lives. With this, though, comes great danger.

In the early 20th century, this knowledge and prejudices that predate this knowledge came together in one of the darkest chapters of U.S. history, a chapter that most have never heard of. This chapter is the time of the eugenics movement. For centuries, man had been learning how plants replicate, and how to alter the natural process by only allowing certain plants to pass on their genetic material. This has revolutionized agriculture, as this knowledge has also been applied to farm animals and pets.

If your view of the person is as a means to an end, it takes very little imagination to see how one could go from using that concept on non-human entities to using it on humans. The basic Progressive idea at the time was that the poor and otherwise undesirable should be prevented from having children. The poor children would have lives that were seen by the elites as not worth living. And the other undesirables, especially those with some form of genetic or moral defect, were a grave detriment to the genetic pool, causing harm to the greater humanity by their continued having of children.

This led to the state-sponsored, forced sterilization of tens of thousands in the U.S. before this evil practice was ended. While the undesirables of eugenics could simply be ignored and avoided by those who didnt want to deal with them, they wouldnt be the only ones who would face this dehumanization.

Instead, things would then get worse. While the inconvenient poor or mentally ill person can be avoided easily by most, a child one is pregnant with cannot. With the declining view of the human person through the commoditization, mechanization, and metallization of man, and declining religious faith in general, society has drifted more and more to a view of the world in which its all me and my happiness, and anything that gets in the way of that must be gotten rid of. If one can declare that the one who is in the way of your perceived happiness is not a person, then it makes getting rid of that roadblock to happiness much easier.

We see this in the modern age in which the abortion industry and those who support its views, including some philosophers, make the false claim that the child in the womb is no different than a wart on your back, making removing and discarding of it a non-issue in the moral sense. How quickly we moved, as a society, from denying the personhood of the undesirables outside of the womb to those inside of the womb. After all, it is much easier for the undesirables outside of the womb to fight their fight in court and in public opinion than it is for the unborn to do so. If we wont defend the right to life of the most innocent among us, the unborn, then how can anyone else hope that their rights will be protected?

This is the case with euthanasia. Euthanasia is pitched as self or assisted suicide that helps free one from a continued life of suffering and pain. Theoretically, this is a voluntary act done by one who has been thoroughly checked out by a psychologist who verifies a lack of mental illness in the person and a clarity of mind to allow them to make a clear choice. In many cases, though, this is not the reality with those who are effectively being executed.

Although there are stories of family members holding down their supposedly-loved ones so someone can administer the deadly chemical cocktail to them, in many cases, it is a panel of experts at a hospital who decide to end these lives. These death panels decide that the patients life isnt worth continuing and that killing them would be a better, less painful, choice. The sad reality is that the authority to do evil acts such as these, while not at all seen as acceptable by the majority of people, are approved and protected by a centralized governmental authority who, rather than protecting the human rights of their citizens from conception to natural death, sees allowing the removal of these undesirables as fitting whatever agenda it is that they want to push.

If doing this to those undesirables is ok, then what happens when you become the undesirable? This is already a problem even before one considers the reality of forced medical testing that commonly is done in regimes that dehumanize their populations that muchincluding the genetic modification of embryos by the addition of animal DNA to them in order to see what happens.

With all of this, man draws ever closer to a sick dream of recreating himself in his own image, becoming whatever he thinks he should be rather than what God made him to be. The deeper one dives into this, the more totalitarian tendencies one starts to see from a government and whatever mob holds positive public opinion at the time. They seek to remake the world as they see fit, as those with lesser knowledge are too stupid to understand. With this special secret knowledge, the modern gnostic seek to escape the bounds of nature, achieving ascension to a greater existence. Unfortunately for them, thats not how it works.

[Image Credit: Unsplash]

Link:

The Metallization of Man - Crisis Magazine

Am J Public Health. 2018 January; 108(1): 5357.

The authors are with the Center for Health Law, Ethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA.

All authors contributed research, conceptualization, writing, and review.

Peer Reviewed

Accepted September 4, 2017.

This article, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg, reflects on the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs and their relevance for today. The Nazi doctors used eugenic ideals to justify sterilizations, child and adult euthanasia, and, ultimately, genocide.

Contemporary euthanasia has experienced a progression from voluntary to nonvoluntary and from passive to active killing. Modern eugenics has included both positive and negative selective activities.

The 70th anniversary of the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg provides an important opportunity to reflect on the implications of the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs for contemporary health law, bioethics, and human rights. In this article, we will examine the role that health practitioners played in the promotion and implementation of State-sponsored eugenics and euthanasia in Nazi Germany, followed by an exploration of contemporary parallels and debates in modern bioethics.1

The involvement of health practitioners in conceptualizing, initiating, and implementing Nazi mass murder remains an unparalleled case of medicine and public healths participation in genocide.2 By January 1933, more than half of the German medical profession had joined the Nazi Party and many participated in the murder of Jews, Sinti, and Roma; the disabled; the mentally ill; and other unfit persons under the guise of improving public health and Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene, the German version of eugenics).3,4

Doctors in Germany became tightly integrated into the Nazi Party and supportive of its ideals. During the Weimar period, a large number of German doctors were unemployed or under-employed and witnessed a decline in their honor and prestige. The Nazi Party seemed like an organization that could reestablish physicians with the power and status they had lost. In 1929, physicians within Germany formed Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher rtzebund (The National Socialist German Physicians League) and unified the goals of physicians and the State. Physicians joined the Nazi Party both earlier and in larger numbers than any other group of professionals. As the historian Michael Kater writes, Physicians became Nazified more thoroughly and much sooner than any other profession, and as Nazis they did more in service of the nefarious regime than any of their extraprofessional peers.3(p45) By 1942, 38000 physicians had joined the Nazi Party. In addition, the Nazi Physicians League began a process of removing Jewish physicians from the medical profession in March 1933, and in April 1933 a law was passed forbidding Jewish physician civil servants from practicing medicine at universities and hospitals throughout Germany.3

Physicians further medicalized Nazi ideology by propagating the science that formed the foundation of a supposed truth. By portraying or certifying Jews and other peoples as racially, physically, or mentally unfit, physicians and government officials claimed to be cleansing Germany of the hereditarily imperfect and the weak. Nazi physicians rose to power and prestige as they used their skills to treat a supposed racial sickness that threatened to contaminate the Volkskrper (body of the German people). Cooperation between the Nazis and health practitioners added powerful justification and facilitated a State-run program of forced sterilization and murder that would have been much harder to accomplish without the willing participation of physicians. What began as purification would ultimately lead to genocide.

A series of recurrent themes arose in Nazi medicine as physicians undertook the mission of cleansing the State: the devaluation and dehumanization of segments of the community, medicalization of social and political problems, training of physicians to identify with the political goals of the government, fear of consequences of refusing to cooperate with civil authority, bureaucratization of the medical role, and the lack of concern for medical ethics and human rights. Nazi physicians viewed the State as their primary patient; some came to see quarantine (ghettoization), exclusion (emigration), then extermination of an entire people as treatment required for the States health. These physicians thought of themselves as biological soldiers instead of healers and caretakers.5

Eugenics arose in the late 19th century as a science that dealt with the improvement of hereditary qualities.2 Indeed, it was considered to be the leading, cutting-edge science of the time, as it was developed and practiced in several countries. This included the United States, where scientists and politicians worked together to research and implement ways of decreasing the number of people considered to be hereditarily weak (negative eugenics) and increasing the number of people thought to be hereditarily strong (positive eugenics).

In some ways, US eugenics programs served as models for the early eugenic initiatives promulgated in Germany.6 Though the Nazi regime later made eugenics infamous through mass genocide, Britain and the United States also promoted policies to apply eugenics to social problems. The United States was at the forefront of the eugenics movement and initiated involuntary sterilization through laws often drafted by physicians. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to enact a law sanctioning the sterilization of social misfits. By 1926, 23 states had involuntary sterilization laws motivated primarily by eugenic ideas.7 In 1927, Virginias law was found constitutional by the US Supreme Court in an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, which used an analogy to the wartime draft.8

Hitlers enthusiasm for eugenic theory is well-known. He read Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene), the standard eugenics textbook during the Weimar years, and incorporated its ideas into Mein Kampf (My Struggle).9 Though Mein Kampf is known for its promotion of eugenic ideas, it was preceded by a number of other formative texts and acts that developed the scope of eugenics to include eradicating diseases, disabilities, mental illnesses, and, finally, whole races.

Following World War I, German health practitioners openly discussed sterilization of the unfit, labeling the care of certain populations a financial burden on the State.10 In Germany, State-sponsored sterilization began in the early 1930s, in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, after legislation was approved to encourage, but not require, the sterilization of patients deemed unfit.11 Compulsory sterilization of the unfit, promoted for decades by prominent figures in German medicine, quickly became official policy soon after Hitler took power in 1933.

On July 14, 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring required the compulsory sterilization of people with any of the following categories of disease: hereditary or congenital feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, hereditary epilepsy, Huntingtons disease, chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, malformation, and severe alcoholism. Patients were sent to eugenic health courts by their primary care doctorsfurther integrating the State and doctors into Germanys eugenic mission. Decisions regarding sterilization were then made by Hereditary Health Courts, which consisted of a 3-person panel. Two panel members were physicians, one a health official likely tied to the Nazi Party and the other an expert in eugenics and hereditary diseases.12 A district judge, usually a Nazi Party member, served as the third, coordinating member of the panel. German physicians forcibly sterilized 360000 to 375000 persons between 1933 and 1939.10(p533)

Euthanasia, which literally means a good death, is most commonly understood today as the bringing about of a merciful death for the terminally, irreversibly ill who are in pain and are suffering. Many patients also fear a loss of autonomy and wish not to be a burden. In a medical context, voluntary euthanasia is understood as the patients decision to end his or her life. But in the Third Reich, euthanasia was a program of State-sponsored medicalized mass murder. The Nazi euthanasia program was part of negative eugenics and Nazi racial hygienes claim that the only way to purify the Volk was by eliminating the unfit. To purify the Aryan German population, 200000 to 300000 people were murdered under the guise of mercy killing, including many of the mentally ill, disabled, asocials, and others deemed unfit.13

Like the eugenics movement, advocacy for a large-scale program of State-sponsored euthanasia preceded the Third Reich. The prominent German jurist Karl Binding and German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a widely discussed book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwertes Lebens (Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living), in 1920.14 In their text, written as a standard academic treatise, Binding and Hoche introduced the idea of lebensunwertes leben (life unworthy of living) and the legalization of the mercy killing of such populations. Drawing on eugenics and Social Darwinism, they argued that the burden on society by having to care for these individuals was too high and their human status too low, that the appropriate solution was the killing of these populations. Although not accepted by the majority of German physicians at the time, many of the procedures put forward by Binding and Hoche, including the 3-person panel deciding whether a patient should be killed, were adopted into the Nazi euthanasia program.12(p4648)

A pivotal case of State-sponsored euthanasia occurred in fall 1938 and was granted personally by Hitler.15 The father of an infant born blind, with a malformed brain, and with 1 arm and part of 1 leg missing, petitioned Hitler for the right to a mercy death for his son. Karl Brandt, Hitlers personal physician at the time, was sent to Leipzig by Hitler, where the baby was hospitalized, to consult with the doctors in charge.15 At the Doctors Trial, Brandt described the orders Hitler gave him: If the facts given by the father were correct, I was to inform the physicians in Hitlers name that they could carry out euthanasia, an order that Brandt followed.12(p51)

Brandt attempted to defend his decision at the Trial by testifying that the decision to kill the infant was hardly unique and in line with a procedure already followed in many German hospitals. In maternity wards in some circumstances it was quite normal for the doctors themselves to perform euthanasia in such a case without anything further being said about it, Brandt said at the Doctors Trial.12(p51) Upon returning to Berlin, Brandt was told by Hitler to proceed in similar fashion with other incurably ill children, an order that initiated the establishment of a formal structure for the euthanasia program.12

A systematic program of euthanasia of unfit children and adults became official policy in Germany in 1939 when Hitler issued a decree commissioning doctors to perform mercy killings on those who were judged incurably sick by medical examination.4 It was thought that the killing of the very young, newborns, and children up to age 3 or 4 years, would be considered the most natural or acceptable, and so the euthanasia program began with the killing of children. These first mercy death[s] involved 5,000 children killed by starvation, exposure in unheated wards, or the administration of cyanide, chemical warfare agents, or other poisons.4(p187188) The program was then expanded to include adults in mental hospitals in accordance with the decree issued by Hitler in October 1939 and backdated to September 1 to coincide with the beginning of the war.12(p6263) The killing of adults was further employed as means of freeing space in hospitals for soldiers who suffered injuries in battle.4(p182) Hitler chose Brandt and Philipp Bouhler, chief of Hitlers Chancellery, to lead and administer the program. Brandt assured the doctors operating the program that Hitlers decree had the force of law and that they would not be prosecuted for their involvement.16 The overall program for killing adults was given the codename Aktion T4 after Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address that housed the offices for the program in Berlin.

The doctors and administrators responsible for carrying out the program created a medicalized structure for each step of the killing process. Midwives and doctors were ordered to report all cases of children with serious hereditary diseases to the Reich Health Ministry. Similarly, doctors were required to report adult patients with certain diseases, patients deemed mentally ill, or patients who had been institutionalized for at least 5 years.12(p6566) These reports resembled a standard medical questionnaire and led some physicians to believe that these reports were merely being used to further scientific research. Then, solely on the basis of these questionnaires, a panel of 3 medical experts was asked to judge whether the patient needed treatmentkillingor whether postponement or observation was appropriate.12(p5253) The 3-member panel consisted of representatives of the T4 leadership, usually Brandt or Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry, along with outside consultants such as Werner Catel or Hans Heinze, who were in charge of the child euthanasia operations at several hospitals. The whole process encouraged the 3 experts to issue a decision for killing.12(p55) The killing was usually ordered by the supervising doctor and often was done by repeated dosages of strong sedatives or morphine. False death certificates were then issued; the cause of death usually listed an ordinary disease.12(p55)

In the case of the larger killing operation of adults and children, transport lists were issued for those ordered to be transferred and murdered at one of the killing centers.12(p70) Buses operated by Schutzstaffel (SS) officers dressed in white medical uniforms took patients to the killing centers. The destination of the buses was kept secret from the staffs of most hospitals and the patients themselves. Thus, from the reporting of hereditarily ill children and adults to the killing operation itself, the whole euthanasia program was a medical procedure administered by medical personnel.12

Six sites were chosen as euthanasia centersBrandenburg, Bernburg, Hartheim, Grafeneck, Sonnenstein, and Hadamar. The 6 sites were selected for their isolated locations; each had been mental hospitals, nursing homes, or jails before being transformed into killing centers.12(p71) At first, killing was done by lethal injection, and it was later performed through carbon monoxide in gas chambers disguised as showers.12(p71) After SS chemists had perfected the gassing operation, Brandt insisted that only doctors should carry out the gassings.12(p7172) The bodies were disposed of in crematoria and the ashes sent in urns to the families along with falsified death certificates issued under a false name by the Condolence Letter Department.12(p70)

Hidden from the German public for years, knowledge about the true nature of the euthanasia program became increasingly common in Germany in 1940 and 1941. After widespread public opposition in Germany, including by churchmen, such as Mnster Bishop Clemens von Galen, the program appeared to end when Hitler ordered its termination in August 1941. But the official ordering of the end of the euthanasia program occurred just as killing in concentration camps began, and a decentralized killing campaign continued in the hospitals.17 Further murder of the unfit started in concentration camps in Germany after August 1941, where a new program titled 14F13 continued as a way of killing large numbers of inmates.12(p133) In total, between 200000 and 300000 people were killed under T4, 14F13, and other related euthanasia programs.18

The atrocities justified and performed by the health practitioners serving the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs exemplify how small steps along a slippery slope can lead to crimes against humanity. The Nazi doctors gradually progressed from eugenic sterilization to child and adult euthanasia and ultimately to murder and genocide. Framed in such medical terms as healing work and death assistance, German health practitioners carried out the murder of thousands of the unfit. Seventy years after Nuremberg, it is important to reflect on lessons we can draw from the history of the Third Reich and to examine the role of contemporary eugenics and euthanasia in medicine today.

Contemporary euthanasia is legally sanctioned in several countries and states. Euthanasia began by facilitating a good death in dying patients who were terminal and irreversibly ill and in pain and suffering. Increasingly there has been a move away from these narrow inclusion criteria to euthanasia in the nonterminally ill, those with chronic disease, reversible treatable disease, and broad notions of psychological and existential suffering. In addition, there has been a progression from voluntary euthanasia to reliance on advance directives or previous statements in cases such as dementia and expanding assisted suicide to active killing. Finally, there has been a limited expansion to include euthanasia of infants and children as well as the incompetent.

Several US states have Death with Dignity Statutes allowing physician involvement in assisted suicide, including California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, DC. Montana allows the end-of-life option through a state Supreme Court ruling. In June 2016, Canada by judicial opinion legalized medically assisted dying to relieve the suffering of terminally ill adults. This legislation specifies that assisted suicide is only permitted if there is voluntary, informed, and understanding consent from the patient. Increasing the slippery slope, however, Canada allows not only assisted suicide but also direct killing for those unable to kill themselves, thus permitting active euthanasia. Assisted suicide for the relief of suffering from a mental illness is permitted by statute in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. Using advance directives to provide prior consent for euthanasia is practiced in Belgium. The Netherlands allows an active ending of the life of an infant or child who is classified as having no hope of a good quality of life or no hope of improvement. (See the box on this page).

Despite this contemporary progression of acts of euthanasia, the modern protocols are open and transparent, and publically reported and debated. Nonetheless, there is evidence of the slippery slope moving from competent suicide with physician assistance for adults to the incompetent, including euthanizing children and newborns.19 Current practices raise the question of ensuring the establishment of proper limits, especially in protecting competent individuals through voluntary and informed consent and defining the role of the State in preventing abuses.20,21

A focus primarily on positive eugenics differentiates modern eugenics as it exists today from American and Nazi eugenics of the early to mid-1900s. Contemporary examples of positive eugenics widely discussed among bioethicists include sex selection, genetic screening or testing, and the more recent controversy over designer babies. As research on genome editing has developed, some foresee a danger in modifying human DNA and the creation of genetically modified humans. A designer baby is an embryo whose genetic makeup has been selected or modified to eradicate a particular defect or to ensure a particular gene is present.22 This can be accomplished by using gene editing tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, which can remove, add, or alter sections of DNA. All of these tools can be used to promote a healthier population, but also contain the potential for abuse. Thus, genetically modified human embryo work that goes beyond disease prevention has become a global concern.23,24 Further modifying DNA of living human beings may have evolutionary impacts.25 The use of embryo selection and genetics blurs the distinction between positive and negative eugenics. In addition, there is a blurring of public and private roles in eugenics. Rather than government mandate, social pressures arguably encourage private eugenic practices.

An example of contemporary negative eugenics is the case of the sterilization of female inmates in California prisons, performed without proper legal permission to do so or without appropriate informed consent procedures.26 According to the California State Auditor, 144 female inmates were sterilized via bilateral tubal ligation during the years from 2005-2006 to 2012-2013.26 At least 39 of those women, about a quarter of the female inmates sterilized, were sterilized following an improper informed consent process, making these 39 sterilizations illegal.26 The audit also found that medical staff rarely requested approval from prison administrators to sterilize inmates, and when they did so, it was not always clarified that the requests were approved.26 As a result of this investigation, a law was enacted prohibiting the use of sterilization as birth control for any inmate under the supervision of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or in a county correctional facility in the state of California.27 Within this law are specified criteria for when sterilization is permissible, as well as criteria for reporting that such a procedure has been performed.27 The case highlights the continued responsibility to guard and raise concern for vulnerable people and their rights, especially those who are under guardianship of the State. Of particular concern is the role of doctors in carrying out the sterilizations.28

Although the proceedings of the Doctors Trial accomplished much in documenting the medical crimes performed under the Third Reich, the Trial did not go as far as it could have done in establishing the crucial role that medicine, in particular the frameworks of eugenics and euthanasia, played in Nazi ideology and mass murder. One of our aims in this review is thus to add to the understanding we now have of the degree of participation of physicians in medical crimes and mass murder during the Third Reich.

In his discussion of the Trial, the historian Michael Marrus has argued that the Trial offered only the crudest of explanations for what had occurred and made no links with eugenic thought and the medical culture of Germany.29(p118) As Marrus points out, because the Nuremberg trials focused on crimes committed against peoples of the nations who triumphed over Germany rather than on the German people, the trial gave little attention to the history of forced sterilization and the euthanasia program within Germany, programs that involved the widespread participation of physicians.29 As Marrus writes,

The Trials focus on non-German victims, mainly in the concentration camps, entailed a downplaying of forcible sterilization and medicalized killingthe victimization of several hundred thousand people, mainly Germans, in which physicians were so heavily involved. . . . As a result, the trial suffered grievously as a chronicle of the medical crimes of the Third Reich . . . and deflected attention from the involvement of the medical profession as a whole in the Nazi enterprise.29(p115)

Most startling, as Marrus highlights, is the judges response to Brandts claim, discussed previously, that there was basis in precedent and humanitarian reasons for the euthanasia killings.29 In their verdict the judges stated,

Whether or not a state may validly enact legislation which imposes euthanasia upon certain classes of its citizens is a question which does not enter into the issues. Assuming that it may do so, the Family of Nations is not obligated to give recognition to such legislation when it manifestly gives legality to plain murder and torture of defenseless and powerless human beings of other nations.30(p11395)

These words ought to give us pause as we consider medical and legal defenses of cases of contemporary eugenics and euthanasia.

One of the most troubling unanswered questions about the Third Reich is how it was possible that physicians could have so willingly participated in mass murder. Were physicians true believers in Nazi racial ideology or instead were they willing and enthusiastic opportunists, who, like Germans in many other professions, joined the Nazi Party for the purposes of career advancement? In dealing with this problem, it could be argued that the medical profession itself includes elements of dehumanization and numbing, as means of coping with the suffering of patients. Alternatively, it could be asked whether the modern medical profession encourages group obedience to authority and the diffusion of responsibility. Physicians may be particularly vulnerable to these pressures, as they have a tendency to compartmentalize, justify, and rationalize problems as a way of coping with what the profession requires. Regardless of whether one finds any of these theories of the perpetrator convincing, there is no denying the vast role that physicians played in shaping and implementing the worst genocide the world has ever witnessed.5

Seventy years after the Doctors Trial, we recognize that it is the duty of those in the medical profession to discuss the implications of the Trial and its lessons for today. We have offered this preliminary discussion of examples of contemporary parallels in pursuit of this goal, but much work remains. As we have made clear, although some aspects of the contemporary cases are troubling, we must be careful not to conflate instances of contemporary eugenics and euthanasia with Nazi eugenics and euthanasia. The misuse of the Nazi analogy is not only offensive and irresponsible, but it can also prevent a clear and important understanding of current cases we need to examine.

The 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Doctors Trial reminds us of the great atrocities that physicians can inflict when medical ethics is distorted by the ideology of a totalitarian State. It is our obligation to study how and why physicians dedicated to health and healing can turn to torture and murder in the service of their country. Reflection on the Doctors Trial reminds us that physicians have a special obligation to use their power to protect human rights and that medical ethics devoid of human rights is no more than hollow words.

Partial funding was provided by the Project on Ethics and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University.

See also Annas and Grodin, p. 10; Wilensky, p. 12; Crosby and Benavidez, p. 36; Annas, p. 42; and Shuster, p. 47.

8. Buck v. Bell, 274 US 300 (1927).

13. Faulstich H. Die zahl der euthanasie-opfer [The number of euthanasia]. In: Frewer A, Eickoff C, eds. Die Historischen Hintergrnde Medizinischer Ethik [The Historical Background of Medical Ethics]. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus-Verlag; 2000: 218229.

15. Benzenhoefer U. Der Fall Leipzig (Alias Fall Kind Knauer) und die Planung der NS-Kindereuthanasie [The Leipzig Case (Alias Fall Kindknauer) and the Planning of the NS Child Euthanasia]. Mnster, Germany: Klemm & Oelschlger; 2008.

16. Hohendorf G. The National Socialist patient murders between taboo and argumentis it possible to draw conclusions on the current debate on medical decisions concerning the end of life from the history of National Socialist euthanasia? In: Bialas W, Lothar F, eds. Nazi Ideology and Ethics. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2014.

27. Cal Penal Code 3440 (2014; enacted).

30. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, Nuremberg, October 1946April 1949, 15 vols. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office; 1949;2:198.

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Canadas government has issued areportconcluding that the countrys mistreatment of indigenous women amounts to genocide, citing, among other travesties, nonconsensual sterilizations. In North America, various prejudices motivate coercive population control policies; in Asia, where most forced sterilizations take place today, unfounded overpopulation alarmism acts as the primary motivation. However it may be rationalized, there is never any moral or practical justification for coerced sterilization.

In late 2018, sixty indigenous Canadian women alleged that they had suffered forced sterilizations andfileda class-action lawsuit against the Saskatchewan province health system. New allegations have continued to come forth in 2019, and one recentaccountclaims an involuntary sterilization took place as recently as last December.

The United States has its own sinister history of forced sterilizations. Roughlyseventy thousandindividuals were forcibly sterilized in the twentieth century under eugenic legislation in the United States. Eugenics was the pseudoscience of trying to improve the population by preventing people thought to have inferior genes from having children. Marginalized groups such as Native Americans were particularly vulnerable. In the 1960s and 1970s, one out of four U.S. Native American womenunderwentsterilization, with that figure rising as high as 50 percent between 1970 and 1976.

Recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States have targeted prisoners, echoing earlier eugenic policies intended to eliminate criminal behavior. Tennessee onlybannedthe coercive sterilization of inmates last year. In 2014, Californiapassedlegislation to stop prisons from non-consensually sterilizing inmates. More than a quarter of tubal ligation sterilization surgeries in Californian prisons from 2004 to 2013 were carried out without the prisoners consent.

As disturbing as reports of coercive population control in the United States and Canada are, such abuses occur on a far larger scale today in India and China.

In 2016, the Supreme Court of India ruled that informed consent is often not obtained from patients prior to conducting the procedures in mass sterilization camps anddirectedthe government to discontinue them. However, an investigationlast year found that camps continue to thrive in the same way as prior to the 2016 ruling. And the U.S. State DepartmentsCountry Reports on Human Rights Practicesfor 2018foundthat coerced abortions and sterilizations continue to take place in China, which softened its one-child policy, restricting families to a single child, to a two-child policy beginning in 2016.

The victims of recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States and Canada are marginalized groups: indigenous women in Canada, and incarcerated, often ethnically minority, women in the United States. Bigotry and paternalism are likely behind these abuses.

The primary motivator of coercive population control measures in China and India is different: concerns about so-called overpopulation. In the 1970s, alarmist writings such as the Club of Romes reportThe Limits to Growthand Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlichs bookThe Population Bombhelped spread fear that overpopulation would deplete resources and result in disastrous shortages. That fear funneled money towards population control. In the 1970s, encouraged by tens of millions of dollars loaned from the World Bank, the Swedish International Development Authority and the UN Population Fund, India began large-scale sterilization efforts. Those efforts peaked in 1975, when the prime minister suspended civil liberties in a national emergency and sterilized oversix millionpeople in a single year. In 1979, China instituted its infamous one-child policy,inspiredbyThe Limits to Growth.

It should be noted that, in addition to overpopulation fears, there are also cases of prejudice against ethnic or religious minorities in China and India. Many victims of forced abortion under the two-child policy in China are minorities, such as ethnicKazakhsandUyghurs. Those groups practice Islam, a minority religion the governmentdeemsinsufficiently Chinese. And in India last year, a union minister of one of Indias two major political parties opinedthat the government must formulate a law regarding population control to save India from the growing non-Hindu population. Still, many victims of coercive population control in both China and India do not belong to any minority group.

While the abuses alone are reason enough to oppose coercive policies, the premise that overpopulation is a problem at all is incorrect. Its quite the opposite, in fact. Newresearchshows that population growth goes hand-in-hand with more abundant resources.

Consider the amount of time it takes an average person to earn enough money to buy one unit in a basket of fifty basic commoditiesthe time-price of those items, so to speak. The Simon Abundance Index, coauthored with Marian Tupy, found that between 1980 and 2018, the time-price declined by nearly one percent for every one percent increase in population. In other words, every additional human being to be born seems to make resources proportionately more plentiful for the rest of us.

Moreover, economic development causes birth rates to fall without any need for draconian population control measures. It is now well-documented that as countries grow richer, and people escape poverty, they tend to opt for smaller families. That phenomenon is called the fertility transition.

In 1979, the year the one-child policy began, Chinas birth ratewasjust under three children per woman. Chinas economy has grown dramatically since it adopted policies of greater economic freedom in 1978, and as the country has grown richer, its fertility rate has fallen. The decline has been perfectly in line with trends in neighboring countries that have also seen rapid economic growth, and that do not coercively limit family sizes.

In India, where liberalizingeconomic reformsdidnt begin until 1992, much later thanin China, the birth rate has alsofallen, albeit less dramatically. This change has occurred as India has grown richer, though not as rich as China. As with China, the decline in Indias birth rate is in line with trends seen in neighboring countries, most of which have seen evensteeperdeclines as their economies have grown. In fact, among Indias neighbors, only Pakistan and war-torn Afghanistan have higher birth rates, although their birth rates are declining as well.

Overpopulation hysteria is just as groundless a reason to forcibly limit reproduction as ethnic or religious bigotry and the pseudoscience of eugenics. Whether motivated by a desire to keep marginalized people from having children or to shrink the population, coercive population control remains abhorrent.

Chelsea Follett is a policy analyst at the Cato Institutes Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and managing editor ofHuman Progress.org.

Image: Reuters

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The Cruel Truth about Population Control | The National ...

This weekends March for Life rally, the large anti-choice demonstration held annually in Washington DC to mark the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, has the exuberant quality of a victory lap. This, the 49th anniversary of Roe, is likely to be its last. The US supreme court is poised to overturn Roe in Dobbs v Jackson Womens Health, which is set to be decided this spring. For women in Texas, Roe has already been nullified: the court went out of its way to allow what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called a flagrantly unconstitutional abortion ban to go into effect there, depriving abortion rights to the one in 10 American women of reproductive age who live in the nations second largest state.

These victories have made visible a growing cohort within the anti-choice movement: the militias and explicitly white supremacist groups of the organized far right. Like last year, this years March for Life featured an appearance by Patriot Front, a white nationalist group that wears a uniform of balaclavas and khakis. The group, which also marched at a Chicago March for Life demonstration earlier this month, silently handed out cards to members of the press who tried to ask them questions. America belongs to its fathers, and it is owed to its sons, the cards read. The restoration of American sovereignty must follow the restoration of the American Family.

Explicit white nationalism, and an emphasis on conscripting white women into reproduction, is not a fringe element of the anti-choice movement. Associations between white supremacist groups and anti-abortion forces are robust and longstanding. In addition to Patriot Front, groups like the white nationalist Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker party have also lent support to the anti-abortion movement. These groups see stopping abortion as part of a broader project to ensure white hegemony in addition to womens subordination. Tim Bishop, of the Aryan Nations, noted that Lots of our people join [anti-choice organizations] Its part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race. That the growing white nationalist movement would be focused on attacking womens rights is maybe to be expected: research has long established that recruitment to the alt-right happens largely among men with grievances against feminism, and that misogyny is usually the first form of rightwing radicalization.

But the affinity goes both ways: just as the alt-right loves the anti-choice movement, the anti-choice movement loves the alt-right. In 2019, Kristen Hatten, a vice-president at the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists, shared racist content online and publicly identified herself as an ethnonationalist. In addition to sharing personnel, the groups share tactics. In 1985, the KKK began circulating Wanted posters featuring the photos and personal information of abortion providers. The posters were picked up by the anti-choice terrorist group Operation Rescue in the early 90s. Now, sharing names, photos and addresses of abortion providers and clinic staff is standard practice in the mainline anti-choice movement, and the stalking and doxing of providers has become routine. More recently, anti-abortion activists have escalated their violence, returning to the murderous extremism that characterized the movement in the 1990s: in Knoxville, a fire that burned down a planned parenthood clinic on New Years Eve was ruled an arson. Maybe the anti-choice crowd is taking tips from their friends in the alt-right.

Its not that the anti-abortion movements embrace of white nationalism is totally uncomplicated. When the Traditionalist Worker party showed up at a Tennessee Right to Life march in 2018, the organizers shooed them off, and later issued a statement saying they condemned violence both from the right, and from leftwing groups like antifa. Hatten was fired from her anti-choice job after a public outcry. The anti-choice movement has even started trying to appropriate the language of social justice. They posit equality between embryos and women, try to brand abortion bans as feminist, incessantly compare abortion to the Holocaust, and claim that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation, in the words of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. Anti-choice groups are eager to claim the moral authority of historical struggles against oppression, even as they work to further the oppression of women.

But the link between the anti-choice movement and white supremacy is much older and more fundamental than this recent, superficial social justice branding effort. Before an influx of southern and eastern European immigrants to the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, abortion and contraception had only been partially and sporadically criminalized. This changed in the early 20th century, when an additional surge of migrants from Asia and Latin America calcified white American racial anxieties and led to white elites decrying the falling white birth rate as race suicide.

Abortion bans were quickly introduced nationwide. As the historian Leslie Raegan put it, White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among white Protestant women. The emerging popular eugenics movement supported this campaign of forced birth for fit mothers, while at the same time implementing a widespread campaign of involuntary sterilization among the poor, particularly Black women and incarcerated women. Meanwhile, white women who sought out voluntary sterilization were discouraged or outright denied the procedure, a practice that is still mainstream in the medical field today.

In the current anti-choice and white supremacist alliance, the language of race suicide has been supplanted by a similar fear: the so-called Great Replacement, a racist conspiracy theory that posits that white Americans are being replaced by people of color. (Some antisemitic variations posit that this replacement is somehow being orchestrated by Jewish people.)

The way to combat this, the right says, is to force childbearing among white people, to severely restrict immigration, and to punish, via criminalization and enforced poverty, women of color. These anxieties have always animated the anti-choice movement, and they have only become more fervent among the March for Lifes rank and file as conservatives become increasingly fixated on the demographic changes that will make America a minority-white country sometime in the coming decades. The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart.

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WILLIAM H.SHELDON

THE SOMATOTYPING THEORY

When looking at life aspects many things need to be taken into consideration. Some of those things involve what we base our thoughts on, and what we believe to be true and what we believe to be false. What a lot of people do not realize is that our world is constructed off of the ideas of theories. One theory specifically curious to me is the Constitutional Theory, specifically focusing on the idea of somatotyping. With this theory and the ideas that follow it, I am focusing on the findings behind crime behavior, and how the Constitutional theory specifically deals with crime and criminology. Don't believe this.

To start there needs to be an understanding of what exactly somatotyping is. By definition somatotyping is: the structure or build of a person, especially to the extent to which it exhibits the characteristics of an ectomorph, an endomorph, or a mesomorph (American heritage, Dictionary.com, 2012). A U.S. psychologist W.H. Sheldon created the idea of somatotyping; in his system he classified human beings in regards to their body type or build. He based his classifications on three specific body types, those being: endomorphic, or round, fat type; mesomorphic, or muscular type; and ectomorphic, or slim, linear type (Encyclopedia Britannica, Dictionary.com, 2012). In order to determine who falls under what body type a somatotype number of three digits must be determined. With Sheldons system the first digit refers to the endomorphy, the second refers to the mesomorphy, and the third refers to the ectomorphy; and each digit is on a one to seven scale, with one being very low and seven being very high (Encyclopedia Britannica, Dictionary.com, 2012). Once a score is determined for an individual, with Sheldons system, you should then be able to determine a personality type for that individual. But with that there lies controversy(s), which will later be explored.

The three areas of the body types now need to be better described. According to Sheldons original model this is how the body types are broken down: he concluded on three extreme types. These extremes were then described as fat or round, muscular or square, and thin or linear; with these extremes then coming together into a balanced center. Directly from Sheldon this is how he characterized and categorized his samples according to body types, to what we now know as somatotyping. To start, Sheldon wrote four books about this theory, and from those four books these things were drawn: individually and collectively, these books deliver three sorts of messages: methodological (how-to-do-it information on somatotyping), substantive (applications of somatotyping to social problems), and visionary or salvationist (assurances that constitutional psychology can guide a eugenics program and save the modern world from itself) (Rafter, 2007).

So basically, Sheldon breaks it down like this: The three layers are called the endoderm or the innermost layer of the body, the mesoderm or the middle layer of the body, and the ectoderm or the outermost layer of the body. The lining of the stomach, intestines, and other internal organs forms the endoderm. The mesoderm is then the tissue from which muscle and bone emerge. Finally, the ectoderm forms skin, nerves, and the brain. He felt it would be appropriate to name the various body-type dimensions after the tissue layers that were most significantly connected with their dominant features (Worldpress, 2011). That being said, the classifications are most simply put like this: endomorphs appear gut dominant, while mesomorphs generally are more muscular, and finally the ectomorphs are highly invested in nervous and cerebral features (Worldpress, 2011). Now that the body types have been broken down, this allows for the investigation into crime patterns associated with the somatotypes, and also the possible future conclusions that can be drawn from each one of the somatotypes.

After extensive research it has been stated that Sheldon classified or implied that the mesomorphic body type individuals (those of the big bone and muscular shape), were more prone to committing violent and aggressive acts, and therefore criminality is rooted in biology, when compared to the other two body types and their crime patterns and tendencies (Maddan, Walker, & Miller, 2008). According to some research, Sheldons idea has been pushed back into the closet, or kept unknown to criminologists, because specialists in the causes for crime are not ready to bury the idea, but at the same time hesitate to put it on display due to the uncertainty of how this idea even got into their field to begin with (Rafter, 2007). Not only has this idea brought lots of confusion among researchers, but it has also brought on deeper thought and curiosity by other researchers, so much so that, for example, Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) use Sheldons terminology and go far beyond his original findings to claim that, Wherever it has been examined, criminals on the average differ in physique from the population at large. They tend to be more mesomorphic (muscular) and less ectomorphic (linear) (Rafter, 2007). With Sheldon being the first person to explore the idea behind body type and behavior with criminal tendencies a lot of controversy has occurred from his thoughts. One of the bigger trends with the controversies is that, very few researchers raise questions about Sheldons methods or findings, they leave the impression that indeed a relationship exists between body build and criminality-therefore somewhat agreeing with Sheldons model (Rafter, 2007). Some go as far as saying Sheldons ideas resemble those of the beloved past topic of phrenology and personality characteristics, but how accurate is it really? So with an insight into some of the basic controversy about this theory, here are some of the findings to both support and reject Sheldons theory and findings.

One thing needs to be stressed with this theory, and that is that Sheldons model and results are based off of male body types, therefore instant controversy is drawn with women and their crime patterns due to body type. Sheldon not only classified people by their body type but by their temperament most associated with each body type in a similar manner, which is where he then concluded the crime tendencies of the individuals. With that, the temperaments were described as biologically determined attitudes, beliefs, and motivations associated with the basic body types; viscerotonia (the relaxed, sociable, gluttonous temperament), somatotonia (dominated by muscular activity and a drive toward action and power), and cerebrotonia (restrained, asocial, dominated by the cerebrum) (Rafter, 2007). With those guidelines, Sheldons conclusions were then drawn. Which as previously stated, implies that the mesomorphic body type individuals (those of the big bone and muscular shape), were more prone to committing violent and aggressive acts based on their scores for mental insufficiency, medical insufficiency, psychiatric insufficiency, and persistent although not necessarily criminal misbehavior, (Rafter, 2007) and their standings under body shape, and temperament classification (Rafter, 2007). Sheldon noticed that from the scorings on his scales, his test subjects and some worldly known individuals that (these) adjudicatable delinquents were superior physically to the other youths, excelling in general strength and general athletic ability (Rafter, 2007). Giving exact reasoning for their higher likelihood for committing crime later in life. After his extensive studying, some interesting findings came about,

Sheldon claimed that crime is caused by inherited biological inferiority and delinquents are less worthy beings than the college man; they (delinquents) are mesomorphs whose behavior is governed by their muscular physiques and not their cerebrums, Dionysian types from whom the world needs savingbut while declaring this he ended up proving the exact opposite in that his actual delinquents turned out to be healthy, vigorous young men and nonetheless, in Sheldons view, his constitutional psychology series demonstrated that biology is destiny, the chief determinant of character and behavior (Rafter, 2007).

Later researchers, have come to discredit many of Sheldons findings, because many of the individuals who he classified as delinquent had not broken criminal laws, but more so just had predispositions to criminal activity (Rafter, 2007), but that he then also ignored key factors such as the individuals environment in sequence to his body and temperament scales (Rafter, 2007). But to counter these findings Eleanor Glueck (1958) had an analysis of the five traits of character structure (social as- sertiveness, defiance, suspiciousness, emotional labiality and destructiveness) shows that only destructiveness is found to exert a significantly different impact on the delinquency of the physique types, being much more characteristic of delinquent mesomorphs than of ectomorphs. So in connection with Sheldon, these findings go on to give more explanation for why certain body types may be more likely for crime behavior: although there are difficulties inherent in somatotyping children at a stage sufficiently early in their lives to make preventive efforts most meaningful, it may prove desirable to construct prediction tables for each body type, using as a basis for them those clusters of traits and socio-cultural factors that have been found in "Physique and Delinquency" most sharply to differentiate delinquents from non-delinquents within each predominant physique type (Glueck, 1958). So where it seems that Rafter may have some sort of disagreement with Sheldons theory, Glueck seems to remain somewhat neutral or somewhat negative on the topic in that her results say that, "mesomorphs and delinquency," contrasts boys of this body build, and for those who represent the great majority of persistent offenders, with boys of other body builds, and indicates which traits and socio-cultural factors contribute most significantly to their delinquency in contrast with other body types (Gleuck, 1958). Finally, there is the individual who finds all options available to an individual to take a role in their resulting behavior with crime. Richard Snodgrasse (1951), simply says this at the conclusion of his studies: the method of studying physique should certainly utilize the techniques of anthropometry (including indices of disproportion), somatotyping, and inspectional assessment of individual morphological traits (Snodgrasse, 1951). Basically saying that more than body type or temperament has to be taken into consideration when trying to map out a specific person or persons crime patterns or tendencies. Regardless of a researchers support or rejection for Sheldons theory, the understanding behind his theory is given in each of their findings. To the extents, that although we may be able to somewhat predict an individuals likelihood for something like committing a crime, there will always be that one person who bucks the system on all angles, which allows us to constantly debate and criticize they theory.

All in all, not one person is right or wrong in their findings and thoughts on Sheldons theory, but in laments terms, Rafter (2007), says it best: criminologists in general may keep Sheldons skeleton in the closet because they are unsure about what to do with it. Social history offers a way to think about and even value Sheldon, apart from the degree to which his findings were correct. After all, he contributed new words to the criminological vocabularysomatotyping, endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphyand his photographic displays constitute one of the most powerful visual rhetorics in criminological history (Rafter, 2007).

As it has been earlier addressed, Sheldons theory has progressed along with the modernization of the world, but has also become a very hesitated topic of conversation among specialists, especially criminologists. Throughout the years, Sheldons theory has had to adjust to new world morals and values, in order to properly be asserted within society. Somatotyping has become the significant focus of this theory of constitutionalism, in order to define somebody by their body type or physical build. Although there is much controversy with this theory, it has been proven pretty prevalent, that the body type of the mesomorph individuals (those of the big bone and muscular shape), seem to be the most likely candidates when predicting crime trends and patterns. Defining individuals by their body type, has become a standard practice with researchers, when attempting to map crime in coordination with specific individuals. There is not a normal body type, but more so a body type that appears to predict crime behavior. This theory has had to evolve in order to apply to the socio-economic changes that have occurred over the centuries, and many researchers have conflicting results on the topic with its relevancy to crime likelihood. From these conflicting results, many factors are responsible, some of those being, the economic status in which an individual is brought up, an individuals family, education, community; all representing the nurture side of an individual which may or may not weaken the argument that the problem(s) stem in an individuals biological make up, bringing in the nature aspect. From this, Sheldons theory strictly based on body type alone is weakened, because more factors are significant in future actions of an individual. These social aspects, therefore weaken Sheldons strict biological explanations for the crime patterns from certain individuals. Sheldons idea has similarities to Lombrosos theory of biology and criminals, in that criminals are physically different from law-abiding citizens and that these differences demonstrated the biological causes of criminal behavior (Akers & Sellers, 2009). To people like Lombroso and Sheldon, people are impacted by their biological breakdown, through genes, disorders, and basic biological make-up. Therefore, criminals are biologically innate to commit crime regardless of anything else from the socio-economical world. From this view, that some may see as a consequence, the inability of those who are born with bad genes are subject to a likely future in crime. Therefore they are destined to be criminals because of their biological make ups, and are then at a social disadvantage regardless of what they attempt to do to avoid it. The formation of and individuals genetic makeup, and their resulting body types, more often than not, supports, Sheldons somatotyping and constitutional theory.

So with those ideas, what can the criminal justice system do to change this, and prevent future rise in crime What policies need to be applied in order to make a difference in these individuals lives, if as according to Sheldon or Lombroso they are genetically destined to be criminals? Some may agree that an individual is biologically destined to be criminal, but so many other theories point to criminal behaviors being a result of so much more. We cannot go around an destroy a line of people, just because they have bad genes or biological factors, so therefore the socio-economic aspect needs to take a bigger role in these theories. There has to be a way to change a path of an individual, who has these poor genes, by the influences of their families, communities, educations, etc. We cannot set these people up for failure, but in turn should use these thoughts to set them up for success- step in before the option to commit a crime is there. All people, regardless of their biological factors and body types, should be eligible for equal futures. Some people feel the need to fulfill a stereotype that is given to them just because they think that is a means to the rules, but other feel the need to buck the system and go against what society has mapped out as socially acceptable for them; with that although this theory may have helped predict and prevent crime from happening, it has probably also caused a lot of negative attention on innocent individuals. It is very clear that this theories, will remain, just that, theories, because regardless of what findings and results people have come to there is always the ability to prove something wrong and discredit it. From Sheldons theory, a specific body type may represent a possibility of a criminal, but it does not seal the deal. The actual crime must be committed. So finally, as mentioned earlier this theory is very touching with criminologists, because they do not know what to do with it, or how exactly to interpret it. All in all, although Sheldon may have had some positively reflective information on how to prevent crime, many aspects were missing from his theory.

Read the rest here:

Sheldon's Constitutional Theory: Somatotyping ...

Forced sterilization was deemed constitutional in a 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, after which forced sterilizations increased dramatically, to at least 60,000 forced sterilizations in some 32 states during the 20th century, predominantly targeting women of color. And while state laws have been changed, its still constitutional, and still going on todaywith at least five cases of women in ICE custody in Georgia in 2019while thousands of victims await restitution, as reports from the Conversation and YES! Magazine has documented.

Organizations such as Project South, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab are actively working to document the extent of this underreported problemand to bring an end to it. Project Censored noted. But their work is even more underreported than the problem itself.

During the height of this wave of eugenics by means of sterilization in the U.S., forced hysterectomies were so common in the Deep South that activist Fannie Lou Hamer coined the term Mississippi Appendectomy to describe them, Ray Levy Uyeda wrote in a YES! Magazine article, How Organizers are Fighting an American Legacy of Forced Sterilization, which begins with the story of Kelli Dillon.

Dillon was a California prison inmate in 2001 when she underwent a procedure to remove a potentially cancerous growthand the surgeon simultaneously performed an unauthorized hysterectomy, one of 148 forced sterilizations that year in California prisons, and one of 1,400 carried out between 1997 and 2010.

Dillon began organizing inside the womens prison gathering testimonials from other victimized prisoners and provided the personal accounts to staff at Justice Now that was laying the groundwork to petition for legislation that would ban the procedures in prisons, Uyeda reported. She eventually sued the state of California for damages and helped to shape legislation to compensate victims (finally passed this year) a story told in the 2020 documentary film, Belly of the Beast.

All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation," Alexandra Minna Stern wrote at the Conversation. Stern directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, where Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories35,000 of them so far captured from historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan.

The history was more complicated than one might expect, Stern explained. At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like feeblemindedness and mental defective. Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism, she wrote. It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway.

California Latinas for Reproductive Justice is working to secure legislative change for victims of the states sterilization efforts between 1909 and 1979, Uyeda wrote. It was signed into law after Project Censoreds book went to print, making California the third state with such legislation, following the lead of North Carolina and Virginia, in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

The history of eugenics has been thoroughly researched and criticized by scholars and human rights activists, but coverage by the corporate media of the U.S. practice of forced sterilization throughout the 20th century and into the 21st has tended to be limited and narrowly focused, Project Censored noted. There was some corporate news coverage after the ICE forced sterilization stories emerged, but generally without any mention of the activists resisting the practice Some establishment press articles on the topic of forced sterilization include comments from members of these organizations to provide context on the issue, but few spotlight the groups tireless organizing and record of accomplishments.

Two exceptions cited were articles from Marie Claire magazine and Refinery29, a website targeted at younger women. This only began to change in July 2021, as Project Censoreds book was going to print, with the Associated Press and other establishment news outlets reporting that California is preparing to approve reparations of up to $25,000 per person to women who had been sterilized without consent.

See the original post:

Activists Call Out Legacy of Racism and Sexism in Forced Sterilization - Shepherd Express

On December 10, the NMU Board of Trustees met for about 10 minutes to strip Luther Wests name from the science building. The West family was given about 10 days notice of this event, and when they asked if they could have time to put together a rebuttal, they were denied.

I am writing this letter because I believe that I am one of few people alive who knew West well. I grew up with his youngest son and spent as much time at the West house as my own. After I graduated from NMU and started teaching, I continued to visit West whenever I was home and had many conversations about teaching and how one should conduct oneself. West always made a point of emphasizing that all students should be treated the same, regardless of who they are or where they came from. That was what he always tried to do when he taught.

We also talked about his time at Battle Creek College. He was not happy with the way it was run, but with a growing family to support he stayed as jobs were hard to come by at the time. He also stated many times that if you have nothing good to say about someone, dont say anything at all.

I noted with interest that the Board did agree to keep the L. S. West scholarship. I wonder if they will place a warning label on it.

I knew West from 1946 until his death and never heard him utter a derogatory word about any person of any race; I cant think of any other person I can say that about.

In a North Wind Letter to the Editor, Aaron Loudenslager states that West voluntarily attended a conference on eugenics and presented a paper there. How does he know it was voluntary? Miriam Hilton interviewed West in August 1972, and in that interview it was clearly stated that Kellogg, whose school he worked at, required everyone on staff to support the eugenics movement. Does that support the voluntary part? I do not know if it did or not but I do not believe we can say one way or another.

Wests talk also included a critique of the methodology used to back up the conclusions of the conference as being inappropriate and hence does not back such conclusions.

West joined the faculty at Northern in 1938 with a family of 5 to support. The curriculum as approved by the administration included a course on eugenics which he was required to teach. That course or a similar one continued being taught till in the 40s. I do not know why it took so long to get rid of it but based on my similar experience as a one-man department, I know it is prudent to establish yourself before making changes. He also may have hesitated because he had a family to support and very few options because of the Great Depression.

I started teaching in 1964 but I stopped to visit West almost every time I returned to Marquette, 2-3 times a year. I knew him to be a true gentleman who showed no hints of racism but only concern for the wellbeing of all others.

Carl W. Anderson, community member, NMU alumnus B.S. 1964

Editors Note: The North Wind is committed to offering a free and open public forum of ideas, publishing a wide range of viewpoints to accurately represent the NMU student body. This piece is a letter to the editor, written by a reader of the North Wind in response to North Wind content. It expresses the personal opinions of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of the North Wind. The North Wind reserves the right to avoid publishing letters that do not meet the North Winds publication standards. To submit a letter to the editor contact the opinion editor at [emailprotected] with the subject North Wind Letter.

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Letter to the EditorIn support of Luther West - North Wind Online

In the fall of 1999, The New Yorker published a short piece about a twenty-three-year-old writer who had just released her first novel, in England. Zadie Smiths White Teeth was due to be published in the U.S. in the spring of 2000kicking off the millennium with a bang. White Teeth, a gentle satire of migration and cultural identity, concerns, among other matters, Nazi eugenics programs, the eschatology of Jehovahs Witnesses, the DNA of mice, and a militant group called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or KEVIN, the piece, by Kevin Jackson, observes. Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream. It can be immensely pleasurable, years later, to revisit the initial discovery of new talents and works of art, the people and projects that gave a decade its own flavor and Zeitgeist.

Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.

This week, were bringing you a selection of piecesa culture review, of sortsthat capture the creative pulse of the early two-thousands. In Dont Look Back and New Frontiers, Anthony Lane explores the mind-bending machinations of Michel Gondrys Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the spare poignancy of Ang Lees Brokeback Mountain. (Brokeback Mountain, which began as an Annie Proulx story in these pages, comes fully alive as the chance for happiness dies. Its beauty wells from its sorrow.) In Flesh on Flesh, John Updike reviews Atonement, Ian McEwans majestic novel of unfulfilled love. (The frail, moist flesh, mutilated in war, corseted and shamed in peacetime, and subject, in the long view, to swift decay, gives this intricately composed narrative its mournful, surging life.) In Living Pains, Sasha Frere-Jones considers Mary J. Bliges accomplished career as she releases her eighth studio album. In Under the Spell and Counterlives, Joan Acocella delves into the phenomenon of the Harry Potter series and analyzes the far-reaching themes of Philip Roths The Plot Against America. (In an eerie conversion, The Plot Against America transforms the piety-spouting, finger-shaking elders of the Roth oeuvre into prophets.) In Sympathy for the Devil, Kelefa Sanneh studies the shifting musical styles of the rapper Eminem. Finally, in Heartbreak Hotels, David Denby examines how Sofia Coppola captures the loneliness and humor of Bill Murrays faded movie-star character in Lost in Translation. Coppola doesnt punch up her scenes; shes not interested in tension leading to a climax but in moods and states of being, Denby writes. Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell.

Erin Overbey, archive editor

Ian McEwans semi-Austenesque novel, Atonement.

At twenty-three, the author has had the nerve to ignore her misgivings and produce her dbut novel, White Teeth.

Philip Roths The Plot Against America.

Brokeback Mountain and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lost in Translation and Dirty Pretty Things.

Eminem pleads his case.

Harry Potter explained.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Mary J. Bliges chronic brilliance.

See the article here:

Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts - The New Yorker

Kathryn Paige Harden at Politics and Prose

Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality might sound like a book written by a 20th-century eugenicist, but its author, Kathryn Paige Harden, is far from that. A professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab, and co-director of the Texas Twin Project, Harden has spent years researching how DNA differences play a large role in educational and economic success to propose a new society where everyone thrives, regardless of how one fares in the genetic lottery. In her book, Harden chronicles the complicated history of genetics, sharing both her and other scientists findings, as well as personal experiences and analogies that help demonstrate how genetic inheritance can sometimes be sheer luck. Throughout Genetic Lottery, Harden challenges notions of racial superiority and eugenics to reclaim the field of genetics, arguing that we must acknowledge the importance (and power) of DNA to create a fairer world. On Jan. 24, at yet another Politics and Prose virtual event, Harden will be joined by Angela Duckworth, founder and the CEO of Character Lab, to discuss Genetic Lottery and how it can be applied to making real-life social change. The virtual talk starts at 6 p.m. on Jan. 24. Registration required. politics-prose.com. Free.

Excerpt from:

City Lights: Professor and Author Kathryn Paige Harden at Politics and Prose - Washington City Paper

Bath Festival is back with a bang in 2022 as it announces big names from the world of music, literature and comedy. Historian David Olusoga, comedian Phil Wang, Nobel Prize winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah and saxophonist Jess Gillam are among those announced as part of this years star-studded line-up.

Celebrating music and books in a beautiful city, this year's Bath Festival will run from Friday 13 May to Saturday 21 May 2022 and festival organisers have released a handful of names ahead of the official line-up announcement at the beginning of March.

From pioneer pop up gigs to discussion around immigration and postcolonialism with some of the world's most eminent authors, this year's highlights will include:

The festival will open with the traditional Party in the City on Friday 13 May, offering dozens of free live music events in city venues for an evening of celebration which attracts tens of thousands of visitors.

The Bath Festival will be once again hosting events in some of the World Heritage city's beautiful historic buildings, including the 18th century Assembly Rooms, Bath Abbey and St Swithin's Church. There will also be events in the Forum, Komedia, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute in Queen Square, at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights at Persephone Books, at Walcot House and in the festival's intimate Literature Lounge which will be set up in Alfred Street.

Following the success in 2021 of a series of guided walking tours created for The Bath Festival, three new themed walking tours have been developed for the May 2022. There will also be creative workshops and, for the first time at The Bath Festival, proof parties at which readers will be able to hear from the rising stars of literature and go home with coveted proof copies of as yet unpublished works.

The Bath Festival 2022 will tackle topics including sense of identity, race, home, grief and families. There will be a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, of classical music, jazz, folk and contemporary sounds. The festival's official bookseller is the independent Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights and the festival is supported by sponsors, including Bath Spa University, Bath BID, Wessex Water and The Royal High School, its patrons and members and an invaluable army of volunteers, without who the festival would not happen.

The full festival programme will be announced on Friday 4 March and tickets go on general release on Friday 11 March.

To sign up for festival news or join as a member for priority booking, visit: https://bathfestivals.org.uk/the-bath-festival/sign-up/

Original post:

Bath Festival Announces First Wave of 2022 Lineup - Broadway World

The term 'eugenics' refers to the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, and is often associated with Nazi Germany.

Morton's complaint against RNZ over the comment was not upheld. The BSA in April 2021 found no breaches of its guidelines for Good Taste and Decency, Balance, Accuracy or Fairness, and said the ACT Party was "treated fairly in the context of the debate".

But Morton told Newshub on Thursday the comment was the final straw for the party, and since then, no ACT MPs have appeared in live interviews for the show.

Newshub has reached out to RNZ for comment.

The boycott first came to light on Thursday morning, after The Spinoff published an interview with Seymour in which he described Morning Report as rude, selective and dishonest about what they wanted to talk about.

"After the umpteenth time that I went on their show out of a feeling of public duty and was belittled and abused with all their snarkiness, I just thought, 'I don't need this,'" he said.

But he told The Spinoff that the "really toxic and comically Lilliputian culture of Morning Report" was different from the rest of RNZ, and ACT MPs would happily appear on the station's other shows.

Morton told Newshub ACT MPs still also appear in pre-recorded interviews that are played as part of Morning Report's news bulletins.

While Seymour was happy for his party to ditch Morning Report, he decried Jacinda Ardern's decision to do much the same thing earlier this year, when she pulled out of her weekly slot on Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking Breakfast show.

He said in March the Prime Minister was avoiding answering questions by "de-platforming" herself from the weekly slot.

"Jacinda Ardern will ultimately regret this escalating arrogance, the latest example being cancelling her weekly discussion with Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking," Seymour said.

"It joins a long list of increasingly hubristic moves from the Prime Minister and her Government."

Ardern said the decision was made so she could branch out more to other media outlets, but broadcaster Hosking said in March that Ardern was "running for the hills" and was "over being held to account".

He said he didn't want Ardern back on his show after she cancelled the slot, which had been observed by New Zealand Prime Ministers for more than 30 years.

Often critical of the Government, Hosking said late last year people "misunderstand" his relationship with Ardern and despite often fiery interviews, he actually "likes her a lot".

"It's our work," Hosking said in December. "It's what we do. There's nothing personal in it."

Read this article:

ACT Party's boycott of RNZ's Morning Report caused by host comparing one of its policies to eugenics - Newshub

I am glad readers are somewhat perusing my letters. Lets pay attention to facts and details.

A recent letter substituted progressives to Democrats (historically correct) with a bold assertion that Democrats nor the left support eugenics, abortion or cultural cleansing. Those were progressive pursuits. But, when reading the Democratic Party platform, one will read these words: that every woman should be able to access high-quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion. Again, corroborate what you know or believe.

This verification unequivocally refutes the claim that the Democrats and the left do not support abortions specifically. Do readers follow voting records of politicians or actions of the Department of Justice that the current administration advocate? Should the Democratic Party platform be denounced?

Another rebuttal is necessary. The major increase in crime during the Trump administration occurred largely in states and cities that are Democratic bastions wholly under their jurisdictions. President Trump honored the Ninth and 10th amendments. Crime and civil violence are escalating under this current administration. Can these points be refuted? No. Be cognizant of what is going on in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and more.

Go here to see the original:

Letter: Pay attention to facts - The Columbian

The term 'eugenics' refers to the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, and is often associated with Nazi Germany.

Morton's complaint against RNZ over the comment was not upheld. The BSA in April 2021 found no breaches of its guidelines for Good Taste and Decency, Balance, Accuracy or Fairness, and said the ACT Party was "treated fairly in the context of the debate".

But Morton told Newshub on Thursday the comment was the final straw for the party, and since then, no ACT MPs have appeared in live interviews for the show.

Newshub has reached out to RNZ for comment.

The boycott first came to light on Thursday morning, after The Spinoff published an interview with Seymour in which he described Morning Report as rude, selective and dishonest about what they wanted to talk about.

"After the umpteenth time that I went on their show out of a feeling of public duty and was belittled and abused with all their snarkiness, I just thought, 'I don't need this,'" he said.

But he told The Spinoff that the "really toxic and comically Lilliputian culture of Morning Report" was different from the rest of RNZ, and ACT MPs would happily appear on the station's other shows.

Morton told Newshub ACT MPs still also appear in pre-recorded interviews that are played as part of Morning Report's news bulletins.

While Seymour was happy for his party to ditch Morning Report, he decried Jacinda Ardern's decision to do much the same thing earlier this year, when she pulled out of her weekly slot on Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking Breakfast show.

He said in March the Prime Minister was avoiding answering questions by "de-platforming" herself from the weekly slot.

"Jacinda Ardern will ultimately regret this escalating arrogance, the latest example being cancelling her weekly discussion with Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking," Seymour said.

"It joins a long list of increasingly hubristic moves from the Prime Minister and her Government."

Ardern said the decision was made so she could branch out more to other media outlets, but broadcaster Hosking said in March that Ardern was "running for the hills" and was "over being held to account".

He said he didn't want Ardern back on his show after she cancelled the slot, which had been observed by New Zealand Prime Ministers for more than 30 years.

Often critical of the Government, Hosking said late last year people "misunderstand" his relationship with Ardern and despite often fiery interviews, he actually "likes her a lot".

"It's our work," Hosking said in December. "It's what we do. There's nothing personal in it."

Read more:

ACT Party's boycott of RNZ's Morning Report caused by host ...

(solarseven/iStock/Getty Images)

These days, anti-humanism is as thick as molasses among the intelligentsia. That includes an ongoing conversation in bioethics whether all things considered human extinction would be a fine thing because of the suffering that never coming into existence would avoid.

Example: A few months ago, Oxford professor Roger Crisp opined that we might not want to stop a huge asteroid from hitting the Earth. From Would extinction be so bad?:

Consider the huge amount of suffering that continuing existence will bring with it, not only for humans, and perhaps even for post-humans, but also for sentient non-humans, who vastly outnumber us and almost certainly would continue to do so. As far as humans alone are concerned, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill at the University of Oxfords Global Priorities Institute estimate that there could beone quadrillion(1015) people to come an estimate they describe as conservative.

These numbers, and the scale of suffering to be put into the balance alongside the good elements in individuals lives, are difficult to fathom and so large that its not obvious that you should deflect the asteroid. In fact, there seem to be some reasons to think you shouldnt.

Perhaps one reason we think extinction would be so bad is that we have failed to recognise just how awful extreme agony is. Nevertheless, we have enough evidence, and imaginative capacity, to say that it is not unreasonable to see the pain of an hour of torture as something that can never be counterbalanced by any amount of positive value. And if this view is correct, then it suggests that the best outcome would be the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our planet.

Crisp equivocates a bit at the end, writing, I am not claiming that extinction wouldbe good;only that, since itmight be, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date. Good grief. Is the issue really debatable?

Not to be outdone, writing in response to Crisp in the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog, University of Calgary professor Walter Glannon shrugs his big brain at the prospect of us being gone. From A world without us:

We cannot predict the sort of lives future people would have because we do not know the sort of world they would inhabit. But the circumstances described above make it difficult to be optimistic. Regardless of the hypothetical value or disvalue of these lives, possible people are not deprived of anything if they do not come into existence.

We have an obligation to collectively act to prevent or reduce the suffering that present and future humans will actually experience. This depends on controlling natural habitats, deforestation, carbon emissions and other processes. Future actual people have the same rights and interests in avoiding suffering as present actual people. The extent of suffering may provide a pro tanto reason to prevent them from existing. Even if there is no such reason, merely possible people do not have these rights and interests because they do not and will not exist. If we become extinct, then the world will go on without us and will be good or bad for no one.

Why do ivory-tower discussions like this matter? Because these nihilists are teaching the society leaders of tomorrow, those who will exert tremendous influence over future public policies and cultural attitudes. With our supposedly best minds suggesting that human extinction could be desirable, is it any wonder why so many of our young people seem to be despairing?

Moreover, the utter terror of suffering is pathological and leads directly to evil and/or terribly wrongheaded utilitarian policies such as eugenics and social Darwinism. It is also the moving force behind the euthanasia movement, which seeks to eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferer. Avoiding suffering is also the central philosophical core of the transhumanism quasi-religion, which seeks to create a corporeal immortality by instilling a new eugenics with very sharp teeth.

So, what should be our attitude toward suffering? It should not be utopian scheming. Nor, to be sure, should it be indifference. Rather, we have a human duty to mitigate each others suffering, to love and suffer with each other which is the root meaning of compassion. And we can harness our own suffering to grow and become better individuals.

In this regard, for my Humanize podcast, I recently interviewed the quadriplegic Christian evangelist and disability rights activists Joni Eareckson Tada, who unexpectedly took a deep dive into this very issue, and in a very intimate and personal way. Regardless of faith issues, her attitude toward and personal response to her own deep suffering is much healthier than the nihilism that has grown so dark within utilitarian bioethics that some dont reject the prospect of human extinction out of hand.

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Bioethicists Okay Human Extinction to Eliminate Suffering - National Review

Peter Jacksons trilogy has been loved by New Zealand for 20 years. Naomii Seah asks if its time we take a closer look.

Lord of the Rings is meticulously crafted, beautifully shot and visionary. The project pioneered visual effects techniques and camera work, employed over 20,000 people in New Zealand alone, and has boosted our national revenue through tourism and merchandise.

But I still dont like it.

Why? Well, for one I have the attention span of a gnat, and more than three hours per movie is just too much. But thats my own fault for watching too many TikToks.

Jokes aside, JRR Tolkien, although in many ways progressive for his time, was not immune to the rhetoric of eugenics and imperialism that permeated Britain in the early-mid 20th century. Theres been endless debate about whether Tolkien was racist. I dont care about that. But he was a British citizen, writing around the time of World War II. And it shows in his description of Orcs as squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types. Its also evident in the way Orc-Goblins and Orc-Men are considered monstrous: an unpleasant echo of the mid-20th-century eugenics movement, which sought to prevent inter-ethnic marriages. Genetic determinism is also front and centre in Middle-Earth, driving its central conflict.

For a film that began production in 1997, Jackson and co sure did carry over a lot of that 1950s prejudice.

Twenty years ago may seem like a long time. Times were different in the early 2000s! I hear you yell across the internet abyss. But it had been an even longer time between the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954 and Jacksons film.

Between 1954 and 1997, apartheid and the civil rights movement had brought global attention to systemic racism. Locally, the 1970s and 80s saw an era dubbed the Mori renaissance, where indigenous arts and language flourished, as those whod had their culture beaten out of them began to reclaim their whakapapa.

Increasing indigenous activism saw a rebrand of New Zealand as a bicultural nation, and perceptions of race relations between Mori and Pkeh continued to be seen positively overseas, despite the realities of day-to-day life.

And in the midst of this swirling debate about race relations, biculturalism and equity, Jackson created a white imperialist film?

Lets unpack. Tolkien aimed to create a sense of history with Middle-Earth. Tolkiens hobbits are meant to represent domestic middle-class England; a romanticised, pastoral, simple way of life that is long gone. Hobbits are ordinary folk and in Jacksons films, ordinary folk are exclusively white or at least white-passing.

That seems particularly damaging when one considers the films positioning as part of New Zealands national identity. Are all New Zealanders meant to identify with the (white) hobbits? Its a callback to the settler culture of New Zealand in the 20th century, when Pkeh glorified the motherland and anglophilia dominated the emerging culture.

Jackson himself noted that his vision of Middle-Earth is more like history than fantasy, and in his interpretation of the texts, Jackson has made it clear that his vision of history is white.

So where are all the people of colour in Jacksons Middle-Earth? Surprise! Theyre the bad guys. The screen adaptation takes the racial coding of Tolkiens description of the Orcs and supercharges it. In the films, Lawrence Makoare and Sala Baker two of the few cast members of colour played the villainous Uruk-hai captain Lurtz, and Sauron himself. Lurtzs White hand of Saruman bears disturbing resemblance to Aboriginal body art, and the facial piercings, darkened skin and dreadlocked hair of the evil races are all cultural markers of ethnic minorities.

While Tolkien at least attempts to humanise the Orcs in his novels, theres little such nuance in Jacksons films. Orcs are born bad, from literal mud and filth, and they oppose ordinary white people.

The central irony is the close association of free peoples and nature. Its a radically revisionist interpretation of history, considering colonisation decimated the landscape of Aotearoa. So it seems extra insidious that an English, and lets face it, white narrative, which explicitly labels the north and west good in opposition to the evil east and south, has become so deeply rooted in the national consciousness.

Its a beautiful film, and for New Zealand watchers, its particularly gratifying to see local scenes displayed in breathtaking panoramic shots. But Jacksons film is not set in New Zealand. And the conflation of Middle-Earth with its English values and imperial undertones with our post-colonial nation is a troubling one. Particularly when the film, and Jackson, are placed on such high pedestals.

But its time we had a closer look at our cultural narratives. Whos writing them? Whos funding it? (Spoiler, the New Zealand army helped build Hobbiton. Make of that what you will). What are their interests? And as a nation, arent we trying to move on from the atrocities of the colonial era?

So before anyone accuses me of being unpatriotic, let me finish by clearing the air. I dont hate Jacksons work. I hate what it stands for.

Were talking about elves, dwarves, cave trolls and sneaky little hobbitses for an entire week. Read the rest of our dedicated Lord of the Rings 20th anniversary coveragehere.

Excerpt from:

Why we shouldn't glorify Lord of the Rings - The Spinoff

Dr. Don Pope-DavisFrom the time children enter school until they graduate, they will take a myriad of psychological and achievement tests measuring their cognitive ability and/or their intelligence quotient (IQ). In America, psychological testing and assessments have increasingly become a prerequisite for many high-stakes competitions, college admissions and scholarships, as well as for entering our national workforce. Currently, there is little evidence of these efforts abating, even in the presence of complaints by those most damaged, harmed, stigmatized and further marginalized by tests minoritized, international, linguistically different, low-income individuals and people of color. The testing industry is prolific and is as engrained in our American experience as the proverbial apple pie.

The historical proliferation of these assessments was spurred in part by French schools in the early 1900s, as white psychologists and psychometricians began to develop early theories and conjectures of learning, and to simultaneously acquire initial beliefs of intelligence, which remain today. Those children who did not pass were deemed imbeciles and removed from classrooms. The genesis of the testing movement created many tests, including the Stanford-Binet Test, which subsequently has been administered to millions of American schoolchildren. Also, all immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th century via Ellis Island were given the Feature Profile Test on American history. Those who did not pass the test were called feebleminded and frequently sent back home.

Problematically, intelligence, aptitude and achievement tests are still used with dismissiveness. This continues a legacy of blatant disregard for cultural, linguistic and environmental influences in childrens development, resulting in subsequent interpretations and uses of scores scores that often differ across racial, ethnic, linguistic and economic backgrounds. Social scientists like Herrnstein and Murray seized the moment in 1994 to capitalize on polemic, deficit-oriented and racist beliefs in their highly supported and highly contested book reminiscent of eugenics advocates.Dr. Donna Y. Ford

Within this context, the American Psychological Association (APA) recently issued a long-overdue apology for the harm the organization and its member psychologists have done in perpetuating systematic racism and its complicit role in exacerbating myths around racial hierarchies, particularly regarding Black communities. APA acknowledges its role in perpetuating racism under the guise of science and the faade of objectivity. The association now more directly proclaims that race is a social construct with no underlying genetic or biological basis.

As Black scholars and leaders in psychology, counseling and education, we strive to expose and mitigate barriers that regularly inhibit educational progress and outcomes for Black and other vulnerable groups. With this in mind, we challenge prevailing moral and social beliefs that permeate institutions. We endeavor to shape more reasonable and moral standards that address structural racism that has served to maintain the status quo.

The Association of Black Psychologists also issued a response. They concluded: To accept the APAs apology would be to accept the accuracy of a fabricated historical record and negate the mission and vision of the Association of Black Psychologists. To our disappointment, to date, responses from other professional organizations are noticeably absent. One exception is theAmerican Psychiatric Association.

Individuals and organizations should not be silent. Instead, we must speak truth to power and work in coalition toward a path forward, proactively and unapologetically grounded in anti-racism. The healing is in the pain. We believe that APA leadership, in collaboration with other organizations, should take a next step by establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to South Africas in 1995. That commission helped accelerate the healing process in the aftermath of apartheid. This will take effort, but the urgency of now is upon us.

Regardless of APAs apologetic treatise, the lethal effects of oppressive psychological science still exist and remain an often-debilitating force in the lives of Blacks and other communities of color. Out of psychology and education have emerged a series of theories, tests, beliefs and practices that permeate every facet and level of the American education system, preschool to postsecondary and beyond. The work of early White psychological science pioneers such as Alfred Binet, Lewis Terman and Carl Brigham spawned an array of aptitude tests, achievement assessments and college entrance examinations that still dictate the educational and vocational options for millions worldwide.

Such tests often normed on the experiences, verbal and non-verbal language and culture of White people favor White, upper-income individuals while disadvantaging other demographic groups. Even with test revisions and updates, they continue to fall short in equitable and culturally responsive ways, as witnessed by limited educational access afforded to students of color and English Language Learners. It is no wonder that we and many scholars still call for more effective and inclusive systems of assessments.Dr. James L. Moore III

Let us be clear. The tests are not the sole issue. Instead, the issue is how people professionals use them in isolation of other critical information. The results are often taken too literally by educators, who use the tests to validate their expectations of minoritized groups. Reification is prevalent. They are used to hinder access togifted and talented programs, courses for advanced learners and access to higher education in general. Conversely, how tests are used plays a dominant role in the over-representation of Black students in stigmatized categories of special education. This is associated, along with excessive disciplining and hyper-policing of Black bodies in academic settings, with the school-to-prison pipeline.

The high-stakes decisions made by testing are carried by students for a lifetime. And so, the missteps outlined in the APA apology continue to reverberate through American schools, impacting our children, their potential and outcomes, as well as the achievement and progress of our entire nation. Therefore, the attitudes and perceptions about minoritized groups must be examined, and a systematic review should be undertaken of training and pedagogical approaches used in educational institutions.

The associations apology should have happened decades ago. The opportunity presented itself when the Civil Rights Act passed, during so many discussions of psychological health and well-being and, nearly two years ago, when George Floyd was murdered. Because of the outsized influence of psychology in other disciplines, organizations should self-examine and follow suit, including the National Association for Gifted Children, Council for Exceptional Children, National Association for the Education of Young Children, American Educational Research Association and the American Counseling Association, to name a few. All have observed their members impact on education and life outcomes using misguided science rooted in racist ideology. It is time to come clean, recognize our complex history and outline a path forward that is indicative of an authentic and sincere apology that leads to new possibilities.

Issuing statements does not fix the historical harm done. To make meaningful change, we must do the hard and messy work of examining the impact and finding commensurate solutions by going deep and wide. Lukewarm, band-aid solutions will not suffice. Gone is the time for allyship that only leads to more webinars with little outcome and accountability. The APA and education field can broadly begin here: Assess who uses psychological tests today, and how. Examine how life-changing decisions are made based on the results. Evaluate how their implementation allows some people to treat others unjustly.

We have the research tools and, hopefully now the will, to guide education, psychology and other disciplines toward equity and inclusive excellence. But the question remains: Will we take this crucial opportunity to do more than simply say, Were sorry? Now, more than ever, we must move along the arc of the moral universe.

Dr. Don Pope-Davis, is Dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University

Dr. James L. Moore III, is Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at The Ohio State University

Dr. Donna Y. Ford, is Distinguished Professor of Education and Human Ecology, at The Ohio State University

Read the original:

Time Will Tell: Three Black Scholars Ponder APA's Apology for Silence and Complicity in Perpetuating Racism - Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

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As the Texas Legislature's special session wound down Thursday, lawmakers sent Gov. Greg Abbott a reworked version of the GOPs so-called critical race theory bill, which aims to restrict how race and history are taught in schools.

After a 81-43 vote Thursday afternoon in the Texas House, the bill went to the Senate, where lawmakers quickly accepted the Houses changes. The bill heads to Abbott with significant changes from what the Senate originally approved in early August.

Abbott had already signed into law a critical race theory bill during the regular session but declared at the time that more needs to be done to abolish critical race theory in Texas classrooms. The current law, House Bill 3979, already restricts how current events and Americas history of racism can be taught in Texas schools but also includes provisions authored by Democrats that required teaching that white supremacy is morally wrong and required readings from prominent people of color in American history.

If Abbott signs Senate Bill 3, it would replace that law. The new legislation would require at least one teacher and one campus administrator at each school to undergo a civics training program. Teachers could not be forced to discuss current controversial topics in the classroom, but if they do, they must not show any political bias.

The advent of slavery in America could not be taught as representing the true founding of the United States, but rather a deviation from American principles, according to the bill. Students also couldnt be required to learn about the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, which aims to put the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

The bill would prohibit students from receiving credit for interning at political campaigns or interning for companies or organizations where they will be lobbying or a part of the lobbying shop.

Any school district that uses an online portal to assign learning material would be required to give parents access.

Neither the original bill or the new one, SB 3, mention critical race theory or how it is taught in schools, however.

Critical race theory is an academic discipline that holds that racism is inherent in societal systems that broadly perpetuate racial inequity. In 2021, Republicans in the Texas Legislature seized on a national movement to ban the teaching of the theory. When a prior version of the bill passed the Senate earlier this summer, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declared that critical race theory teaches that one race is better than another and that someone, by virtue of their race or sex, is innately racist, oppressive or sexist. But academic experts say GOP leaders have misrepresented the tenets of the framework, which many teachers say is not being taught in Texas schools anyway.

State Rep. Dan Huberty, R-Houston, added amendments to the bill that protect teachers from any lawsuits, but school districts have the authority to ensure compliance. While SB 3 leaves out the reading requirements found in current law including works authored by people of color Huberty's amendment ensures that the State Board of Education does not exclude those readings based on the bill, especially as the state agency begins to revise the social studies curriculum.

Lawmakers also removed a requirement that would teach bout the history of white supremacy including institutions such as slavery, the eugenics movement and the Ku Klux Klan as morally wrong, which is a requirement in current law. But the bill does not prohibit this from being taught in schools or stops the SBOE from including it in future curriculum.

Huberty claimed Thursday that the amendments added made the bill better and defended state Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, the chair of the House Public Education Committee, for getting the bill to the House floor.

But still, for Democrats, the bill is unnecessary.

Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, said the measure is an effort to continue micromanaging teachers and a solution to a problem that doesnt exist. Instead, legislators should have been focusing on issues that teachers say they have, she said.

Please, go ask your social studies teacher, What can we do to support you in your job? she told her colleagues during a two-hour debate. My guess is they ask for a reduction in the required testing and paperwork, an increase in their pay and more latitude in what they teach and say in the classroom.

Rep. Ron Reynolds, D-Missouri City, said SB 3 is a blatant attempt to censor valuable education in our classrooms and whitewash our history.

Erasing an uncomfortable reality of our past does not benefit our students with the knowledge they need to understand the present to work towards a better future, he said.

Jonathan Feinstein, the Education Trust Texas state director, said in a statement that while the amendments added Thursday are a good faith effort to mitigate the harm of the legislation, there is still work to do when it comes to protecting students right to learn and educators freedom to teach an accurate and truthful history, including the countrys history of racism.

Texans must be more engaged than ever in their local schools to ensure this legislation is not misinterpreted, misused or abused to threaten or punish teachers and students for confronting the hard parts of our shared history and seeking to create a better future, Feinstein said in a statement.

Disclosure: Education Trust and New York Times have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Join us Sept. 20-25 at the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival. Tickets are on sale now for this multi-day celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the days news, curated by The Texas Tribunes award-winning journalists. Learn more.

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GOP bill targeting how race, slavery and history are taught in Texas schools heads to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk - The Texas Tribune

Stephen Fry is a podcasting pioneer who made his first,Stephen Frys Podgrams, back in 2008 half a decade before the format went mainstream, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. His latest is a fascinating and lavishly upholstered 12-part history series,Stephen Frys Edwardian Secrets.

Like its 2018 predecessor,Stephen Frys Victorian Secrets, the new series ranges widely, with great confidence and wit. It kicks off with Edward VII (Dirty Bertie) and his gargantuan appetites (culinary and sexual), then loosens its stays to explore such subjects as the history of flight, eugenics, the suffragists, detective fiction, black Edwardians, sexual attitudes, psychoanalysis and the rise of the tabloid press.

Theres plenty of delicious tittle-tattle as well as solid nuggets of knowledge. And Fry is on top form in non-pompous mode and clearly enjoying himself as he steers this opulent ocean liner of a series with suavity and skill.

Finding Q, a superb new podcast about the online conspiracy theory QAnon, is one of the most gripping shows Ive listened to in ages, said James Marriott in The Times.

The core tenet of the cult-like movement that the US government, and the world, are secretly run by a cabal of cannibalistic Satan-worshipping paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton is obviously deranged. Yet the great triumph of this podcast is that it carefully documents all aspects of a movement that is both sinister and banal, laughable and bloody terrifying.

Presenter Nicky Woolf talks to both true believers and people whose lives have been ruined by the cult, as well as those involved in its inception on the 8chan chat site. It makes for a fantastic series that opens up lavish panoramas of modern politics, the recesses of the internet and human psychology.

The best true crime shows from the US podcast network Wondery are like a fireside ghost story, or an old film noir with gravelly voice-over, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. The secret to their success is simple: a brilliant tale-teller spins a thrilling yarn.

The latest in the genre is their fab new series,The Grand Scheme: Snatching Sinatra, about the 1963 kidnapping of Frank Sinatras son, Frank Jr.

The narrator is John Stamos, an American actor who has a personal connection to the case, and he tells the tale with lan and delight. Various California types, famous and not, wander through the story, giving it all anL.A. Confidentialfeel.

But the biggest pull is that the show is based around the memories of the actual kidnapper, Barry Keenan, who proves a gift of an interviewee.Plus, the story is so bananas that it had me properly laughing on a couple of occasions. And no one gets hurt.

Are German voters turning away from Angela Merkel and the centre-right? Whats really causing an NHS test tube shortage? And why is China banning games on school nights?Olly Mannand The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

Original post:

Podcasts: Edwardiana, conspiracies and a kidnapping - The Week UK