Daily Archives: July 7, 2022

Plural Like the Universe – City Journal

Posted: July 7, 2022 at 9:33 am

Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist who, in many respectsand in many aspectsis a fitting poet for our identity-obsessed age, was at least four poets. His best verse, and much of his prose, entered the world variously under the sign of the pastoralist Alberto Caeiro, the classicist Ricardo Reis, and the world traveler lvaro de Campos, as well as that of Pessoa himself, the progenitor of this powerful triad that he dubbed heteronyms. Too complexly realized to be mere pseudonyms, too individual in their tastes, temperaments, philosophies, and flashings-forth of genius, they were the high triumvirate among the more than 100 literary alter egos that Pessoa invented in his lifetime, many coming to light only after his death. Be plural like the universe! he commanded himself. Walt Whitmanone of his largest influencesmay have contained multitudes, but Pessoa sent his panoply of inner selves flocking out into the world, where they unfolded rich psychologies, personal convictions, and private obsessions. The heteronyms argued with one another in print, at times even taking issue with Pessoa himself.

Pessoas unstable identity reflected the upheaval of his time, as well as the disruptions of his own early life. He was born in 1888 in Lisbon, the capital of a decadent, declining power whose ruling family had sat on the throne since 1640. Even for left-wingers, colonialism was synonymous with national pride: Portugals economy depended on wealth extracted from Brazil, and its monarchy, at the time of Pessoas birth, laid claim to a vast swath of lightly occupied, poorly administered colonial territory stretching the entire breadth of the African continent, from what is now Angola in the west to Mozambique in the east. This was the decaying empire, the glory days of which Lus de Cames, Portugals national poetwhom Pessoa aimed to outdohad extolled in his Virgilian epic The Lusiads.

By the time he died, in 1935, Pessoa had lived through a dictatorship, a republican revolution, the end of the Portuguese monarchy, the Great War, and the first several years of the Salazar regime. Despite writing at length on imperialism, decadence, and other cultural topics, he remained allergic to the vocabulary of social responsibility. Even his close friends had trouble pinning down his views. As the critic Harold Bloom remarked, Pessoa can be read as a political poet only if you start with the good mornings conviction that everything is political, including a good morning. But he wasnt insensitive to the world around him. His three major heteronyms emerged in 1914, the dawning of World War I, as though welling up from the fissures of a fractured way of life. More than any of his contemporaries, Pessoa personalized the upheaval of his time. Each disruption occasioned a seismic shift of self, as Ricardo Reisa Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese, according to Pessoatells us:

Fate frightens me, Lydia. Nothing is certain.At any moment something could happenTo change all that we are.

Brilliant, restive, alternately depressed and exhilarated, Pessoa had second thoughts about everythingand third and fourth thoughts, too. After dropping out of college, he cadged money from relatives and friends, borrowed against his mother and stepfathers investment bonds, and supported himself by writing letters in English and French for Portuguese businessmen, while pursuing a dizzying array of literary projects and business schemes, most of which never got off the ground. His life in Lisbon was hectiche made the rounds of literary cafsbut largely uneventful. Having diagnosed himself with a mild sexual inversion, he never married, and likely remained a virgin. He was besotted not with men or women but with language, enamored of his own alchemical creative powers. Endlessly fecund, he seemed to be at times a spectator of himself, the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me.

They belong to the world now, Pessoas invented selves. In the dramatis personae that opens Pessoa, Richard Zeniths mammoth new biography of the poet, we learn, charmingly, that Reis immigrated to Brazil in 1919, and was still living in the Americas, perhaps in Peru, when Pessoa died in 1935the heteronym surviving his maker. Pessoas first biographer, the Portuguese author Joo Gaspar Simes, believed that the exotic appeal of the heteronyms would fadebut, in fact, it has only grown stronger with time, the poets self-partitioning a more apt allegory for the obsessive and self-obsessed way in which so many of us craft our digital personae, personal brands, and public-facing lives. Pessoas inventions, sprung from their captivity in the large wooden trunk he left behind, stuffed with more than 25,000 papers, have unquestionably outlived him.

But for every full-fledged soul and perfect piece of writing he produced, there are dozens of fragmentary works and pseudo-authors who exist in little more than name. These cast-off limbsrubble [from] a kind of literary Pompeii, Zenith calls themput me in mind of those wonderfully expressive hands by Rodin on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: radiant with genius, but incomplete. Even Pessoas greatest prose work is a tumulus of shards. Early on, in November 1914, he told a friend, despairingly, My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on The Book of Disquiet. But its all fragments, fragments, fragments. Like his contemporary T. S. Eliot, Pessoa went on to the end of his life shoring up fragments, though not exactly against his ruins.

Born to a romantic, literary mother and a civil servant father who moonlighted as a prolific music and theater critic while slowly dying of tuberculosis, Pessoa grew up a sensitive, withdrawn, yet independent child. Words were his playthings, though he still enjoyed the good health of understanding nothing, as he later wrote. One thing he may have struggled to understand during those early Lisbon years was the disruptive presence of his paternal grandmother, the half-demented Dionsia. Prone like her namesake, the Greek god, to fits of madness, she furnished the future creator of so many alternate selves with early evidence, according to Zenith, that multiple personalities can dwell in one and the same human body.

At age five, Pessoa suffered the deaths, six months apart, of his father and his infant brother, Jorge. Then he watched, bewildered, as his mother whipsawed from grief to giddy elation. Just days after losing her son, she met a charming Portuguese navy captain: the attraction was electric, and they soon married. Here was another lesson for the budding Pessoa. Grief doesnt last because grief doesnt last, the heteronym lvaro de Campos tells us in a poem about a newly bereaved mother. The mother who loses her son is a recurring figure in Pessoas mature writings, along with an awareness of how quickly the loss can lose its sting. Personalities, emotions, marriage, widowhoodit seemed that nothing was stable or endured for long.

In Pessoas childish imagination, reality itself grew unstable: daydreams supplanted the waking world. Egged on by a doting uncle with a weakness for make-believe, the future poet began to people his solitude with fictitious individualsat least two of whom, Captain Thibeaut and the Chevalier de Pas, he remembered for the rest of his life as having been utterly real to him, fathomed to the depths of their souls. This dreamy habit only augmented in adolescence. The lonely boys desire to surround himself with friends and acquaintances who never existed prefigured the grand fakery of a literary career in which he would conduct interviews with himself, one heteronym picking anothers brain. Years later, Pessoa would play with his own selfhood as he had once played with imaginary friends: I unwind myself like a multicoloured skein, or I make string figures of myself, like those woven on spread fingers and passed from child to child. . . . Then I turn over my hand and the figure changes. And I start over.

Starting over was what the chameleon-like boy and his mother did in Durban, South Africa, where her new husband assumed the post of Portuguese consul. The largest city in the British colony of Natal, Durban boasted efficient public transportation, a public library, a botanical garden, literary societies, and other trappings of civilization, including the rigorous convent school where Pessoa was promptly enrolled. Forced to start the five-year primary school curriculum over from the beginning, and in a new language, he finished in just three years, receiving First Prize in both English and Latin as well as the award for all-around academic excellence. In high school, he devoured the prose of Thomas Carlyle and wrote verses emulating Milton and the English Romantics. Pessoa returned to Lisbon for good in 1905, but his exposure to Anglo-American literature proved decisive.

The most crucial influence was Whitman. The American poet, Zenith writes, taught Pessoa how to open up, feel everything, be everything, and sing. The experience of reading Song of Myself made possible the sudden emergence, on March 8, 1914, of his first true heteronym, a pastoral yet unsentimental poet named Alberto Caeiro:

I am a keeper of sheep.The sheep are my thoughtsAnd my thoughts are all sensations.I think with my eyes and my earsAnd with my hands and feetAnd with my nose and mouth.

A rush of poems poured from Pessoas pen in this astonishing new voice. Ostensibly lacking in formal education, Caeiro was nonetheless a keen observer, newborn with every moment / To the complete newness of the world. It was as though he had distilled the antidote to his own overwrought intellectualism:

I lie down in the grassAnd forget all I was taught.

However, as Thomas Merton, Caeiros first major English translator, noted, these poems have a touch of self-consciousness. It is as though the world in which the Galician poet declares himself an Argonaut of genuine sensations were not the everyday world but some imagined highland of the sun, where things dwell in accurate light and cast clean shadows on the eye. Caeiro is more cerebral than Whitman, who had likewise wondered at the material world and refused to offer final answers:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands.How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Pessoa dreamed of launching himself as an English poet in his own right. He wrote dozens of sonnets, publishing 35 of them as a chapbook, and sent poems to the Poetry Society in London. (They were ignored.) Often, he attributed his English works to one of his other selves. Incredibly, Pessoas last name means person in Portuguese, as well as persona. Seemingly taking the hint, he punned with the names of his English alter egos, tooeach had a distinct signature and notebooks of his own.

First came Charles Robert Anon, who published a poem in a Durban newspaper in 1904. He was superseded, around 1906, by Alexander Search, who claimed authorship of more than 100 poems, a short story, and various essays. Zenith characterizes Search as a Platonic or transcendent version of Pessoaa Shelleyan idealist questing after truth, with a head full of philosophy and enlightened humanism. In other words, Pessoas most fervent spiritual or metaphysical inquiries in English were conducted by an alter ego named A. Search. Years later, Caeiro, again as if reacting to his makers native bent, declared this search pointless: Things have no meaning: they have existence. / Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

Zeniths biography takes flight whenever it immerses us in the Pessoan imagination and tends to flag when it turns political or sociological. The Durban section gets bogged down in passages about the living conditions of native Africans and Indian immigrants in Natal, as well as asides about the racist division of labor that they were part of. The index has a two-page entry for blackface. Zeniths book having been published in 2021, it was perhaps inevitable that some of its 937 pages (not including the prologue and back matter) would be devoted to convicting Pessoa of racism and misogyny wherever possiblethough Zenith in the role of judge and jury has clemency enough to acknowledge that such attitudes, never central to Pessoas genius, had shallow roots and were eventually outgrown as he matured. A biographer, having promised us a portrait of the man, can be forgiven for describing his outer garments as a clue to the essential self, but its another thing to spend thousands of words on the pedigree and life history of the subjects tailor and on the labor practices of the mills that produced the cloth out of which said garments were made.

The essential self lies elsewhere, and what is best in Pessoa transcends politics. Yet Zenith devotes a whole chapter to Gandhi on the thin pretext that the older man was a practicing lawyer and budding civil rights activist in Durban while Pessoa was a student in primary school. Its true that Pessoa admired Gandhi later in lifemainly for his asceticismbut Zenith doesnt stop there. He closes a disquisition on the British treatment of Indians as second-class citizens this way: All of which no doubt seemed to Fernando, the stepson of a European diplomat, like the natural order of things. Rare indeed is the biographer who would feel compelled to round out his portrait of the artist as an eight-year-old by depicting that child as a representative of white supremacy.

If theres one thing I hate, its a reformer, writes Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, defining this type as a man who sees the worlds superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. Call him a reactionary, if you like; one searches his oeuvre in vain for a social program. Roman Catholic by birth, he was a spiritual seeker and dabbler in the occult, obsessed with astrology, and a thoroughgoing skepticpart of a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths, which presumably would include most of the secular dogmas in which our media and universities today catechize the faithful. In one of his English poems, Pessoa locates God Between our silence and our speech, between / Us and the consciousness of us. Religious curiosity and metaphysical concerns crop up frequently in his work, whether attributed to a heteronym or not. Even Caeiro, whom Pessoa dubbed an atheist St. Francis of Assisi and who denies any reality beyond material things, invokes Godif only to say that the deity is largely beside the point:

To think about God is to disobey God,Since God wanted us not to know him,

Which is why he didnt reveal himself to us. . . .Lets be simple and calm,Like the trees and streams,And God will love us, making usUs even as the trees are trees

Religion, for Pessoa, was an illusion without which we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who cant have illusions. His dreams were, first and foremost, about self-invention, self-division, self-multiplication. His inability to believe in the triune God seems wedded somehow to his endless unfolding of new personae. lvaro de Campos sets intellectual uncertainty beside the wish to be someone else:

Every day I have different beliefsSometimes in the same day I have different beliefsAnd I wish I were the child now crossingThe view from my window of the street below.

Just so, Pessoas detachment from society gives rise to the impulse to invent his own society. In his static drama The Mariner, a character tells of a shipwrecked man, who, finding it too painful to recall his former life, invents an imagined past, a fictitious homeland, the made-up people and geography and events of which gradually supplant his actual memories. Pessoa, in The Book of Disquiet, longs to create in himself

a nation with its own politics, parties and revolutions, and to be all of it, everything, to be God in the real pantheism of this peopleI, to be the substance and movement of their bodies and their souls, of the very ground they tread and the acts they perform! To be everything, to be them and not them!

An infinite expansion and elevation of the self, so that it would exist as both deus and demos, bringing about a solipsistic kingdom of heaven on earth, though this nationwith its parties and revolutionswould be fractious, disputative, rabble-rousing. Among friends, Pessoa had a fondness for ardently defending a certain idea one day and then attacking it the next, with equally impassioned arguments, Zenith writes. While the more romantic modernists sought an unfractioned idiom (as the American poet Hart Crane put it) with which to mount their raids on the inarticulate, Pessoas own idiom was endlessly fractionated, full of tricks and evasions, enriched by philosophies and ways of seeing that he practiced for the length of a poem and no longer. Rather than try to integrate his disparate drives into a cohesive whole, he heightened the contradictions. He produced new selves as if by cellular mitosis and gave them independent life.

Among these selves was the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, the supposed author of Pessoas unclassifiable prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet. This factless autobiography, as Pessoa/Soares calls it, was first published in 1982 (47 years after Pessoas death), but subsequent editions have enlarged and reordered its contents, about which editors and scholars disagree. A nonbook of which no original exists, begun in 1913 and consisting of irregularly dated entries composed intermittently over the course of 20-odd years, some handwritten, some typed, with no definite order or overarching schema, The Book was nonetheless an astonishing discovery. Few posthumous works have caused such a dramatic reevaluation of their authors achievement.

I make landscapes out of what I feel, Soares writes. The Book of Disquiet puts you midway along the journey of another mans life, lost in the dark wood of his interiority. But whose interiority, exactly? The Books heteronymic authorship changed over time; but ultimately, Pessoa laid it at the feet of his invention Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who lives in a rented room on the Rua dos Douradores and writes in his spare time. Soares espouses a philosophy of inaction, lives in his imagination, and, at times, can view his fellow Portuguese only as an alien tide of living things that dont concern me. Less individuated than Caeiro, Reis, and de Campos, Soares is a sort of pared-down Pessoa, possessing his irony but not his humor. His semifictional diary is a kind of library in utero; many of the roughly 500 passages feel like the seeds of unwritten books, sorties where a more stolid writer might have launched entire campaigns.

Written over half a lifetime, The Book discloses an unwieldy profusion of styles and genres, from ethereal dream scenes and prose poems to clear-eyed confessions and cultural observations, sociological speculations, aesthetic maxims, and aphorisms worthy of Kafka. Even if you arent as dreamy or passive as Soares, you know what he means when he says that he is suffering from a headache and the universe. Paradise, for Soares, is eternal stasis, everything in abeyance: a world in which the same moment of twilight forever paint[s] the curve of the hills, a life that resembles an eternal standing by the windowbecause, even in paradise, he imagines himself as alienated, an observer at one remove from the scene. The Book of Disquiet never ceased being an experiment in how far a man can be psychologically and affectively self-sufficient, living only off of his dreams and imagination, Zenith tells us. It was an extreme, monomaniacal version of Pessoas own, essentially imaginative way of living life.

It was probably also a coping mechanism. The world of daydreams is one where mothers dont plunge suddenly into obsessional love affairs and where little brothers dont expire in infancy. Tedium besets Soares, but tedium is a small price to pay. The fictions of my imagination . . . may weary me, but they dont hurt or humiliate, he says. They never forsake [me], and they dont die or disappear.

Twenty-first-century America, with its cult of action and positive thinking, would hardly know what to make of the dreamy, ineffectual Soares, were it not that the narcissistic sublime (or a degraded facsimile) has become our dominant cultural mode. Then, too, at a time when some individuals claim to be incapable of settling on a single gender, much less any other unambiguous identity, we are primed to accept what Zenith calls Pessoas poetics of fragmented selfhood. There are moments in The Book of Disquiet when Pessoa breaks through the authorial mask, if only to affirm his lifelong masquerade: To create, Ive destroyed myself. Ive so externalized myself on the inside that I dont exist there except externally. Im the empty stage where various actors act out various plays. The triumph of his heteronymic enterprise is like that aimed at by those who today practice manifesting: the triumph of an idea transcended into life.

The Pessoan spiritalbeit lacking his geniusis alive and well. It lives on in Reddit forums, Twitch chats, Twitter feeds, and other venues where anonymity, or pseudonymity, is common and where even members of the blue-checkmark class, who use their real names, put up a front. The once-singular self divides or turns into a heteronym. Online spaces are loud with the personae we have unleashed.

I know this firsthand. In the summer of 2021, I delved into the world of non-fungible tokensdigital items that are provably unique and the ownership of which can be publicly verified on a blockchain. NFTs represent a new frontier of art and collectibles, gaming and pop culture, where even some of the biggest-name artists and collectors dont use their real names. Instead of self-portraits, they employ NFT avatars as visual identities. In this scene, anonPessoas first major English heteronymis a common form of address for a compatriot whose real-world identity you may never know.

To participate, I needed a suitable persona. So I created a pseudonymous Twitter account, registered domain names to match, and launched my alter self into that hothouse ecosystem. More gregarious than usual, I found it easy in that guise to make friends and forge bonds. The real me, such as he was (shades of Whitman again), took a backseat. And it worked: inside of three months, I had gained 1,000 followers and a reputation as a serious collector. We are what we dream ourselves to be, Pessoa says. Through his eyes, I have come to see the Internet increasingly as a place where heteronyms abound, casting large shadows and printing their own legends. From Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto to the master conspiracist Q, these identities shape the lives of millions.

Who, then, is the real Pessoa? A dream dreamed by no one, he sometimes thoughtas Borges imagined Shakespeare in one of his Ficciones. One of Pessoas strongest poems, The Tobacco Shop, begins:

Im nothing.Ill always be nothing.I cant want to be something.But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

In Borgess story, Shakespeare at the end of his life, having been so many men in vain, asks God to give him at last a singular identity to call his own. From a whirlwind, the voice of the Lord answers: Neither am I anyone; I have dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who, like myself, are many and no one.

Wanting to be everyone while fearing that he was no one, Pessoa was nonetheless, in his fiercest moments, in touch with an unshakable core at the center of his kaleidoscope of selves. Refusing either to suppress or falsify his internal conflicts, he displayed a kind of radical authenticity. Even if what we pretend to be (because we coexist with others) crumbles around us, we should remain undaunted, he exhorts readers in The Book of Disquiet, because were ourselves, and to be ourselves means having nothing to do with external things that crumble, even if they crumble right on top of what for them we are.

Nearly 90 years after his death, the best of this inveterate pretenders poetry and prose has not crumbled.

Brian Patrick Eha is a writer in New York.

Top Photo: Fernando Pessoa (18881935): even his close friends had trouble pinning down his views. (Milton Daz/GDA/AP Photo)

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Plural Like the Universe - City Journal

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There’s a straight line from eugenics to ‘biblical family values’ to white supremacy and the anti-abortion movement – Baptist News Global

Posted: at 9:31 am

Pro-life conservative evangelicals erupted into unanimous jubilation at the news of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. But while united in their celebration, they are divided in their vision for the future of the pro-life movement and unaware of its past.

Karen Swallow Priortweeted, Our work now is just starting: We must help and support moms, dads and babies. Love them all and in so doing making abortion unimaginable.

In an opinion piece for theNew York Times,she argued, We are our brothers and our sisters keepers, and it does take a village to become who we are. In that spirit of community, she recommended a number of whole-life approaches, includinga public policy agenda the Southern Baptist Convention recommended at its 2022 meetings that includes alleviating hunger and strengthening low-income families.

But a closer look at the SBCs public policy agenda shows it also highlights adoption, discrimination against LGBTQ people, and support for faith-based schools.

Many people balked at her statement, including Kristin Du Mez, whoasked Prior directly, If this support wasnt there to actually *prevent abortions* (small-scale pregnancy crisis centers and free diaper coupons if you attend Bible study not withstanding) why should we expect conservative Christians to step up now?

And given the anti-social-justice rhetoric coming out of men like John MacArthur and Voddie Baucham as well as evangelicalisms track record of dismissing social concerns as being woke, CRT, or big government, its understandable that many would be skeptical of Priors vision.

The Gospel Coalitionpublished one piecesaying that whole-life approaches are little more than a lazy slander of the pro-life cause, that they distort pro-life priorities, and are too exhausting even for Superman, among other things.

They publishedanother piececlaiming overturning Roe v. Wade is a story about God.Hehas heard our prayers and used our efforts, andhehas done a great work. Italicizing the words he in an article celebrating the taking away of womens rights seemed odd.

The pro-life conservative evangelical visions for moving forward after Roe v. Wade would seem to be to an attempt to convince evangelicals to embrace social action to a degree they never have before.

Then they publishedanother articlethat claimed: As the church applies a robust ethic of each persons dignity, it requires us to care for individuals holistically. The churchs involvement in adoption and foster care are good examples. Contrary to the criticism that Christians only care about the issue of life up until the moment of birth, a recent study concluded believers are nearly three times more likely to adopt than the general public.

So the pro-life conservative evangelical visions for moving forward after Roe v. Wade would seem to be to an attempt to convince evangelicals to embrace social action to a degree they never have before, to demonize supporting mothers and babies as lazy slander, to offer theological thoughts and praises about the topic, or to promote sexual discrimination, adoption and Christian education.

When we found out in January 2009 that we were having a miscarriage after a number of years of hoping for a baby, Ruth Ellen and I began to consider pursuing adoption more seriously. Like many young conservative evangelical married couples, we longed to be parents as a way to love the vulnerable. And adoption seemed to be a great way to fulfill our desire to be parents while reflecting our theology that God had adopted us.

Little did we know, however, that as good as our intentions may have been, we also were being influenced by an evangelical adoption industry that had been shaped for decades by theologies of patriarchy and white supremacy.

Although slavery and adoption may seem like totally different pictures of the gospel, both converged through patriarchy and white supremacy in the worlds of evangelical education and adoption.

Two of our favorite theologians at the time were John MacArthur and John Piper. While MacArthur believes slavery is the heart of the gospel, Piper believesadoption is the heart of the gospel. And although slavery and adoption may seem like totally different pictures of the gospel, both converged through patriarchy and white supremacy in the worlds of evangelical education and adoption.

But to understand how education and adoption may play a role in conservative evangelicalisms strategy for the future, we need to reflect on how they were formed in the past.

At the dawn of the 20th century, leaders in the United States noticed the falling birth rate of Western nations and began to discuss the problem of race suicide. President Roosevelt warned of this looming danger, writing in a letterto pastor Franklin C. Smith in 1911: 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?

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.

The themes of patriarchy and white supremacy paired with the fear of feminism and non-white people were laying the groundwork for what would be considered the American biblical family.

In an article subtitledEugenic Mythologies and Internet Evangelism publishedinThe Journal of Legal Medicine, Paul A. Lombardo explains how eugenics began in 1873 as a way of saying that physical, mental and moral deficiencies were based in heredity and were passed down predictably within families from generation to generation.

Just asJohn MacArthur arguedthat the inhabitants of Africa were destined by God to be perpetually a servile people to European and Jewish families due to the curse of Canaan in Genesis 9, the promoters of eugenics argued that the intergenerational poverty of Black families was proof that Black families were under the curse of Exodus 20:5, where God promised to visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. A fear spread of problem families, seemingly infected with bad heredity that explained their social failure over many generations that was evidenced in moral evil and social dependency and was used to promote eugenic political policies, Lombardo explained.

The famous evangelist Billy Sunday bought into eugenics, often preaching against one God-forsaken, vicious, corrupt man and woman to breed and propagate and damn the world by their offspring, and arguing that children have a right to be born cleanly into the world and not be damned into the world before birth by a predetermined heritage of blight.

Children have a right to be born cleanly into the world and not be damned into the world before birth by a predetermined heritage of blight.

In his article, Lombardo shows how supporters of eugenics believed a society of sound individuals would stabilize the state; a clean physical race could be the first step to reform.

In a piece titledThe Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values, Audrey Clare Farley adjunct professor of U.S. history at Mount St. Marys University shows how evangelicals promoted positive eugenics after World War II in order to increase the breeding of the fit (able-bodied, middle-class whites), providing a far more respectable face for the movement.

One leader of the evangelical eugenics movement, ironically, was an atheist named Paul Popenoe, who founded the Los Angeles-basedAmerican Institute of Family Relationsin 1930 with the goal of strengthening families by removing what he thought to be obstacles to white reproduction, such as rape, masturbation, pornography, female frigidity, and feminist yearnings. Farley shows how Popenoe promoted complementarian gender distinctions and prohibited inter-racial marriage and homosexual relationships, while training pastors and psychologists to follow his patriarchal, white supremacist, homophobic vision.

One psychologist Popenoe influenced was James Dobson, who served as Popenoes assistant, a detail Farley notes was conveniently not mentioned in Dale Busss book, Family Man: The Biography of Dr. James Dobson.

Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, has been the single most influential figure in shaping the modern American evangelical view of biblical family values through a daily radio broadcast, books, films and online content.

In aLos Angeles Timesarticle titled Childs IQ Depends on Mother from 1968, Mary Barber identified Dobson as the assistant director of PopenoesAmerican Institute of Family Relations. In the article, Barber says Dobson pointed out that everyone is a victim of some degree of impoverishment but the barren surroundings of a ghetto probably is the worst for providing intellectual growth for children.

In another 1976 Los Angeles Times article titled Husbands Advised to Change Priorities, Dobson told wives not to cage their husbands, to be quiet and not run him down, while admitting his views of gender distinctions may sound chauvinistic.

Dobson also applied what he learned at Popenoes AIFR in a 1972 article titled A Successfully Defiant Child Lacks Respect. In theDaily News-Postcolumn on parenting, he said theres no substitute for spanking and that if a little child doesnt obey immediately, then mother tweaks the little muscle between his neck and shoulder.

Dobson still was touting Popenoes teachings as late as 1994 in an article titled Men, Women Differ in Every Cell of Their Bodies, where Dobson named Popenoe and then went on to parrot Popenoes views of gender and sexuality.

Popenoes influence not only included Dobson and the millions of evangelicals Dobson shaped.

Popenoes influence not only included Dobson and the millions of evangelicals Dobson shaped. He also wrote for Ladies Home Journal, was a guest on conservative evangelical shows, and was cited in Herbert MilesSexual Happiness in Marriage, J. Allan PetersonsThe Marriage Affair, and in Tim and Beverly LaHaysThe Act of Marriage.

Given his fathers atheism, Popenoes son David told the Institute of American Values, My father was no more religious than ever, but (evangelicals) were his new professional and ideological allies and protges.

To that Audrey Clare Farley added, Such history reveals how fears of racial decay have shaped the conservative imagination of morality.

As patriarchal, complementarian, homophobic, narratives of eugenics shaped conservative evangelicalism over the decades, their demand for more children grew.

One such movement was the Quiverfull movement. As Kristin Du Mez details inJesus and John Wayne: Quiverfull women had a critical role to play in birthing an army of God; the culture wars needed as many soldiers as possible. Outbreeding opponents was the first step to outvoting them, and in their reproductive capacities, women served as domestic warriors.

Du Mez pointed out that the Quiverfull movement began gaining national traction in the homeschool movement as the Duggar family grew in popularity due to their TLC show19 Kids and Counting. Combining the reproductive capacities of women with educating children, the Quiverfull movement would provide combatants in the war against Islam.

In an interview withBaptist News Global, Audrey Clare Farley explained how conservatives have tapped into the fear of race suicide and turned to eugenics through education.

It is important to understand that character education has historically been tied to eugenics.

It is important to understand that character education has historically been tied to eugenics. In the early 20th century, the high-water mark of the eugenics era, some racial purists asked if it was possible to form respectable (read: white) citizens by molding their character. Most believed it was impossible. Those with bad genes that is, the poor, disabled, immigrants and people of color could not be made into noble citizens. Character education was really for those who were well-bred. It would help to make the naturally fit even stronger.

Scholars have placed Bill Gothard and Dr. James Dobson within this tradition. Both men targeted conservative white Christians with their ideas about discipline and biblical family values, which were meant to form citizens who could fight evil, secular culture. But, of course, neither Gothard nor Dobson explicitly rejected people of color, and so those BIPOC children who were subjected to their programs were essentially urged to adopt worldviews with roots in segregation and eugenics.

One of the most popular strategies conservatives are using today, and one that was highlighted in the SBCs 2022 public policy agenda, is the issue of school vouchers.

Farley explains: The rise of school vouchers is part of this project. Conservatives proclaim that vouchers enable disadvantaged students and those of color to access a better education. But the rights goal is to bankrupt public schools and divert tax dollars toward academies that indoctrinate youth with rightwing politics the very politics that have stalled racial progress in education and beyond.

And as child liberationist theologianR.L. Stollar points out, for many evangelicals, homeschooling is the perfect option for training these culture warriors because 48 states have no protections for at-risk homeschooled children. These states have fallen into line with total parental sovereignty, giving parents absolute power that has resulted in child abuse and trafficking.

Eugenics received another boost in 1987 through Ben Wattenbergs bookThe Birth Dearth.Ellen Goodman wrotein theWashington Postat the time: Wattenberg is a demographer for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and no slouch in the pop sociology division. He builds his thesis on one indisputable fact: Today, with little warning, the total fertility rate of American women has dropped to 1.8, slightly below the replacement level.

The major problem confronting the United States today is there arent enough white babies being born. If we dont do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white mans land.

Wattenberg argued that The Birth Dearth is due to low fertility among the middle and upper middle class.He said, The major problem confronting the United States today is there arent enough white babies being born. If we dont do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white mans land.

He was especially concerned that a decreasing white population would lead to no longer being able to support the defense systems which are the basis of national power and security.

Goodman interpreted, He outright says that its women who hold the fate of the Western world in their hands. Or, more precisely, in their wombs.

Wattenberg offered three potential solutions. He said we could pay women to have babies, but that unfortunately we would have to pay women of all colors to have babies. He said we could increase immigration, but that unfortunately most of the immigrants would be non-white people. So he argued that the third and best option was to stop abortion. Rememberthat 60% of the fetuses that are aborted every year are white, he said. If we could keep that 60% of life alive, that would solve our birth dearth.

In June 2020, Kevin DeYoung entered the fray. He wrote an article called Its Time for a New Culture War Strategy seemingly ignorant of the entire culture war strategy his movement had been using for the previous century. He was very upset that the Supreme Court defined sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity. And just like the homophobia that had permeated the eugenics movement, DeYoung had enough.

DeYoung has been one of the most vocal leadersagainst social justice, joining the likes of Owen Strachan, John MacArthur and Voddie Baucham.

He said: Heres a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: Have more children and disciple them like crazy. Strongly consider having more children than you think you can handle. You dont have to be a fertility maximalist to recognize that children are always lauded as a blessing in the Bible.

After arguing against birth control, DeYoung said: Do you want to rebel against the status quo? Do you want people to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you? Tote your brood of children through Target. There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children.

There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children.

Then with the stroke of prophetic vision, he concluded, The future belongs to the fecund.

To be fair, he did briefly mention loving God, people and the truth. But the thrust of his article was not about love, but about getting your wife constantly pregnant with a ton of babies.

Just as eugenics attempted to shift toward a positive message after World War II, the evangelical adoption movement attempted to shift toward a more positive branding in 2007, led by the likes of Rick Warren. As Kathryn Joyce notes, Promoting adoption would help rebrand U.S. evangelicals from moral scolds to childrens champions.

In the spirit of DeYoung, one evangelical leader said evangelicals should get as many people in the church to adopt and adopt as many kids as you can.

The way these adoption agenciesspoke negativelyof the birth mothers and families mirrored the way the promoters of eugenics spoke negatively of minority mothers and families through the 20th century. And as Chrissy Stroopdetailed, the result of this missionary project was corner-cutting and human-rights abuses that would lead to severe trauma that can never be erased.

Farely told BNG There is absolutely a connection between the ideas of Popenoe, Wattenberg, DeYoung, and some proponents of evangelical adoption: All view the family as a means to promote whiteness. For Popenoe and Wattenberg, the goal was very explicitly to outbreed people of color. For DeYoung and many adoption proponents, an acceptable outcome is rearing children who carry water for whiteness as culture warriors. In the latter scenario, a Black or brown child can be made to support the racist politics and theology of white evangelicalism, which have so devastated communities of color around the globe that families within those communities are forced to give up their infants to more advantaged and in many minds, deserving families.

There is absolutely a connection between the ideas of Popenoe, Wattenberg, DeYoung, and some proponents of evangelical adoption: All view the family as a means to promote whiteness.

To be fair to evangelicalism, the problems here are much bigger than evangelicalism. Unfortunately, the leaders of conservative evangelicalism like to present themselves as preaching the objective universal truth outside of culture revealed by God in the Bible. But they are seemingly unaware how their supposedly objective truth is culturally situated in a broader culture of white supremacy.

Farely pointed to other Christian groups as well: In the last few decades and especially the last few years, white Catholics have also taken pains to induct children of color into the logic of white supremacy. Beyond crusading against BLM and CRT, many bishops, priests, school leaders and parents have pushed the narrative that racism is a spiritual problem, rather than a social one. As religion scholar Matthew J. Cressler hasdemonstrated, this narrative can be traced to Catholic segregationists. When throwing bricks at civil rights activists failed to stop desegregation, white Catholics appealed to a supposedly God-ordained division between the spiritual and political realms. As in Protestant circles, then, the rhetoric of colorblindness only emerged as a means to obstruct Black advancement. Yet Catholic children today are taught this way of thinking flows from the gospel.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, evangelicals are focusing on assimilation by adopting babies and educating them into their vision for the world. They believe this strategy is going to save the eternal souls of babies and win a culture war they are waging.

But while young couples should be encouraged and equipped to care for the vulnerable, they need to realize that doing so within the adoption and education industries of evangelicalism is promoting a patriarchal, complementarian, homophobic, physically and spiritually abusive narrative of white supremacy that has been forged by presidents and pastors alike for more than a century.

Rick Pidcockis a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. Hes a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He recently completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog atwww.rickpidcock.com.

What has John MacArthur actually said about race, slavery and the Curse of Ham? | Analysis by Rick Pidcock

Kristin Du Mez explains white evangelicals and abortion on NPR show; Ed Young preaches Mothers Day sermon on abortion

Our Father: A quiverfull of racism and anti-reproductive rights | Opinion by Erica Whitaker

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There's a straight line from eugenics to 'biblical family values' to white supremacy and the anti-abortion movement - Baptist News Global

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Viewpoint: In response to historical misuse of genetics to defend eugenics, some egalitarians call for defunding. Here’s why that’s not the solution -…

Posted: at 9:31 am

Its no wonder many people are wary of behavioral genetics. The field, which examines how the DNA were born with affects our behaviors, has been hijacked by eugenicists, white supremacists, and run-of-the-mill bigots as a way to justify inequality for minorities, women, poor people, and other disadvantaged groups for over a century.

But anyone interested in egalitarian goals should not shy away from the field, argues psychologist Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden. Instead, they should embrace it as a tool to inform policies that promote equality.

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Genetic research has even been used to justify eugenics: the belief that genetics indicate a natural human hierarchy that determines ones social value and standing. Eugenicists have advocated for sterilizing or otherwise attempting to eradicate individuals or entire cultural groups deemed genetically inferior or unfit due to their genes.

In response to this historic misuse, many people and organizations with egalitarian values have chosen to ignore, degrade, or ban funding for research on genetic and biological differences.

Dr. Harden takes the opposite stance. Despite or perhaps because of this historic misuse, she argues that people interested in equality cannot ignore genetic differences. To do so would allow the misinterpretation and abuse of genetic research to go unchallenged.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

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Viewpoint: In response to historical misuse of genetics to defend eugenics, some egalitarians call for defunding. Here's why that's not the solution -...

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To Be or Not to Be a Mother: A Timeless Question with New Urgency – Justia Verdict

Posted: at 9:31 am

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court, dominated now by a bloc of six arch-conservatives, overruled Roe v. Wade. Under the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the states are now free to make abortion illegal, and to shut down whatever abortion clinics still remain in conservative states. The decision was and will remain controversial.

The abortion issue has been much disputed from the moment Roe v. Wade was decided, although a significant majority of Americans support legal access to abortion, at least in the first trimester. Public opinion, in fact, has never run as strongly in favor of abortion as it does right now. Yet, in many states, abortion was severely restricted, even before this latest decision. A pregnant woman in these statesand soon in perhaps as many as half of the statesis (in effect) forbidden to terminate a pregnancy. By government fiat, that individual is ordered to carry her baby to term. Legal abortion will no longer be possible, except in cases where the pregnancy is life-threatening to the mother. Illegal abortion will become more common, as will interstate travel to seek abortion services in a friendlier state. But for some people, a states ban on abortion will result in a forced pregnancy and, if she and the fetus survive to term, a forced birth.

Many of those women, in states without legal abortion, will be poor; many will be Black or Brown; many will be minors. Women with money, time, and freedom of movement can, at least for now, escape to another state to exercise what used to be a constitutional right. People from Texas can go to New Mexico. Women in Indiana can cross the border into Illinois. Many will do this, though some states have indicated they intend to pass laws trying to prevent this type of travel. But many who would have sought an abortion in their home states simply will not be able to travel to find care. The legislatures of right-to-life states are willing, even eager, to force pregnant women, whatever their age, class, or race, to go through pregnancy and give birth. Only days after the Dobbs decision was issued, media reported a story of a 10-year-old pregnant rape victim who was denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio under the states draconian new law that had just taken effect. Some of the state laws go to great lengths to ban all abortions; they have no exceptions for pregnancies caused by incest or rape; and certainly not for hardship, poverty, or the fact that the fetus is suffering from severe or even lethal defects that might lead to stillbirth or death shortly after birth.

Eugenic Ideas and American Law

Abortion law has a fairly long history. The opinions in Dobbs go into this history, in enormous detail. Lawyers and historians have documented the many errors the majority makes in its cherry-picked and sometimes erroneous recounting of history. But even if the facts they rely on were accurate, there is a way in which the majority simply fails to get the story right. Arguably, the intellectual and political background of abortion law is almost the exact opposite of what drives the antiabortion movement today. Criminal abortion bans in the United States date to the late nineteenth century in many states. Prior to that time, abortion was hardly regulated at all. But the movement to impose criminal bans had a social connection to the eugenics movement. The point of the movement was to prevent the wrong people from giving birthpeople who were considered criminal, or degenerate, or feeble-minded. It was not to force them to carry a baby to term; but not to carry it in the first place.

At the time, the eugenics movement was flourishing. It had many backers in high places; and it was considered, by many scholars, to be supported by the lights of modern science. The basic idea was simple: research showed (it was thought) that crime, perversion, feeble-mindedness (a term commonly used in laws at the time), and general rottenness, were genetic traits; they ran in families; they were handed down from generation to generation. As we elaborated in more detail in a prior column, there was an entire field of science devoted to proving that these various traits were hereditary. Although many are familiar with the horrific eugenic practices in Nazi Germany, those ideas originated in the United States. Degenerates multiplied like rabbits, or so the eugenicists argued. Unless something was done, the country might be swamped with them. Society needed reproduction to be centered among the respectable; among good people, educated people, people healthy in body and mind. The eugenics program thus had two prongs: to encourage the right people to have babies (positive eugenics); and to prevent the wrong people from having children at all (negative eugenics).

One way to shut off the supply of bad babies at the source was to sterilize their potential parentsthose likely to produce bad seed. Indiana passed the first sterilization law in 1907. It applied to residents in state institutions. If a committee of experts felt it was advisable, confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles, could be sterilized. Californias sterilization law was enacted in 1909. California was one of the most enthusiastic states in this dubious business. Thousands of young Californians, in state hospitals, were sterilized before 1940. Sterilization laws were controversial; but they were mostly upheld by the courts. The Supreme Court weighed in in 1927, in the notorious case of Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck, who was white (and poor), was said to be the daughter of a feeble-minded woman, to be feeble-minded herself, and the mother of a feeble-minded child. The Court, in a short and snappy opinion, gave its approval to Virginias sterilization law. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, three generations of imbeciles are enough. Sadly, the burden of these laws fell mostly on poor women and women of color, who were sterilized on the basis of the flimsiest evidence, or no evidence at all. Carrie Buck, in fact, was a woman of normal intelligence; and so was her daughter.

In addition to the involuntary sterilizations that were authorized by law, many women were sterilized against their will and sometimes even without their knowledge by doctors who simply implemented their own social beliefs with a scalpel. The Mississippi appendectomy is a term used to describe the practice common at some teaching hospitals in the South of giving poor, black women hysterectomies without informed consent.

In addition, state legislatures took steps to tighten their marriage laws. Some states eliminated so-called common-law marriage. These were informal marriagesno witness needed; no marriage licensethat were perfectly legal in many states. The problem was that the state had very little control over these marriages. The newer marriage laws now piled on formalities, including blood tests, and the marriage codes made people ineligible to marry if they had certain traits or diseases believed (often incorrectly) to be heritable. The general point was to prevent unfit people from marrying (and presumably having children). In Washington State, for example, under a law passed in 1909, no common drunkard, habitual criminal, epilectic, and no imbecile or person who was feeble-minded; or who had a venereal disease, was entitled to get married.

This was the negative prong of eugenics. And while it certainly made life difficult for many individuals, it did not have much overall effect on the birth rate. The positive prong of the eugenic program was more difficult to implement than the negative prong. You could hardly insist (say) that graduates of elite colleges had a positive duty to get married and produce as many babies as possible. That was clearly not feasible. But one small step was possible: a crack-down on abortion. Indeed, laws against abortion became more restrictive in the late nineteenth century. There were many reasons for this development, but eugenic ideas were at least partly responsible. There were prominent abortionists who catered to upper-class women. The most notorious, perhaps, was the woman who called herself Madame Restell, in New York City, who lived in a mansion and charged high prices to her wealthy clients. Madame Restell and other abortionists were accused of a kind of crime against traditional Americawhite Protestant America. The lower classes, it was felt, were producing baby after baby; middle-class women on the other hand were killing or preventing babies from being born. This was one of the cardinal sins of abortion; it was weakening the stock of good, solid American babies.

The modern abortion controversy could hardly be more different. Eugenics no longer has any scientific credibility. Sterilization laws have been repealed or struck down. The class and race issue in the abortion controversy has been, in a sense, turned upside down. The abortionist is no longer someone like Madame Restell, catering to upper-class women who refused their duty of becoming a mother. Todays abortionist is a medical doctor, working for Planned Parenthood, or in another clinic, and using a procedure or a medication that is both safe and effective. The burden of abolition has fallen, and will fall, not on rich women, but on poor women and minority women, particularly as the cost and distance necessary to travel for care will both skyrocket. And those same groups will be the ones with more forced birthsadded on top of the disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity they already suffer due to inequity in our healthcare system. And the core of the movement to abolish abortion is a moral and ideological cluster of ideas, which are in essence, deeply religious, and which are spearheaded by those religions that are traditional and dominated by men. Indeed, male domination, and resistance to the womens movement, is at least implicit in some aspects of the anti-abortion movement.

No Justices of the Supreme Court say, or are willing to say, that they are opposed to abortion because, according to the dictates of their faith, abortion is murder. What they can and do say instead is that Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided (the Courts abortion jurisprudence is explored in more detail here). Abortion, according to the majority opinion, has no basis in constitutional law. That body of law provides no support for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Moreoverand this is crucial for the majoritya right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nations history and tradition. This may be true; but is obviously irrelevant. Are equal rights for women deeply rooted in American history and tradition? Not at all. Nor is racial equality deeply rooted in history and tradition. Modern civil rights law is precisely a rejection of the main line of American history. If the only rights the Court is willing to recognize are those that are deeply rooted in history and tradition, not much would be left of modern free speech jurisprudence, or due process of law.

Supreme Court decisions on matters of constitutional law almost always dip into the jungle of legal history. Conservative justices insist that constitutional decisions must be historically grounded, that is, based on the text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment, or whatever clause is at issue. But rummaging around in the past is rarely enlightening. The legal history of abortion, as we indicated, provides very little guidance for today, because the context in the past was so different from the context of our times. Indeed, history points if anything in the opposite direction from Dobbs. No court today, including the Supreme Court, would accept a statute that allowed people to be sterilized against their will without, at the very least, an exacting process to determine the need for it. Yet in 1927, in Buck v. Bell, the Court accepted an approach to involuntary sterilization that showed total disregard for the individuals bodily autonomy and right to reproduce. Overruling Roe v. Wade is, in a way, resurrecting the mindset of Buck v. Bell. It allows the state to control womens bodies in an analogous way: by forcing women to carry unborn children to term against their will. If we accept the idea that Buck v. Bell is no longer good law, then it is hard to accept the idea that a state should be able to make a womans choice to terminate her pregnancy a crimecertainly not at the point when the preborn child is a small clump of cells.

Justice Alito, after claiming that abortion is not deeply rooted in our history and tradition, goes on to say that, on the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment was the norm up to the time of Roe v. Wade. The tradition was hardly unbrokenbefore the enactment of the criminal abortion bans, abortion was either unregulated or banned only well into the second trimester. But what is more significant is that the tradition rested on legal and social bases which were, as we tried to argue, substantially different from the legal and social concerns of today.

The plain fact of the matter is that Dobbs is a political decision; it is a decision that pleases the religious right; and which pleases one political party much more than the other. (It terrifies many others.) To be honest, most key decisions of the Supreme Court are political decisions. They come out of political contexts, and they have political and social consequences. Justices are nominated and confirmed in our times because the President who nominates them expects them to make the kind of decisions the President wants. Historical evidence does not provide solutions to hotly contested issues, especially when it is constructed by those with an agenda and without the training to decipher historical evidence. The majority in Dobbs called Roe v. Wade egregiously wrong from the start. It is entirely possible that some future Court will pin that label on Dobbs.

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To Be or Not to Be a Mother: A Timeless Question with New Urgency - Justia Verdict

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Another point of view – Arkansas Online

Posted: at 9:31 am

Americans are having trouble seeing things from other points of view lately. And not just lately. People in the United States have had this problem since before there was a United States. So maybe it's just a problem of being human. One of many.

For example, there is the Dobbs ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court last week, which overturned Roe v. Wade and the "right" to end a pregnancy. Or, in another point of view, end the life of a living person in the womb before he or she is allowed to be born.

Here are some of the things we've read in the paper about that ruling, from a certain point of view:

"It is unconscionable that a group of politicians, who mostly neglect families that look like mine, now have the power to endanger women's health and criminalize our doctors for offering appropriate life-saving care."--Tennessee state Sen. London Lamar, as quoted in The Washington Post.

"Today is a dark day in our nation's history, and this decision is a devastating confirmation of what Black and brown reproductive justice organizers have been sounding the alarms about for years: This Court will stop at nothing to strip away our reproductive freedom and our fundamental human right to bodily autonomy."--U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, in a statement.

"Women of color, poor women, Black women are often the canary in the coal mine on these issues. Their experience really telegraphs where we are going with this."--Melissa Murray, New York University law professor.

Or, from another point of view, the latest ruling by the United States Supreme Court prevents Black and brown children from being aborted.

This past week, Star Parker, one of our syndicated columnists, reminds us that about one-third of all abortions in the United States are performed on Black women. Another way to say that, one-third of all children prevented from being born are Black.

We are also reminded of the writings of Justice Clarence Thomas in 2019 in a concurring opinion on an abortion case, in which he dedicated 12 pages in his opinion to repeating the awful history of eugenics in this country and around the world. He warned his colleagues that the high court's continued backing of Roe at the time might lead to abortion-by-racial-category and, in effect, eugenics. There was talk at the time that anti-abortion leaders should pass laws to challenge Roe not on privacy issues, but on discrimination.

According to The Washington Post, "Not all states report racial and ethnic data on abortion, but among those who do (29 states and D.C.), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that a disproportionately high share are women of color. In 2019, the abortion rate for Black women was 23.8 per 1,000 women. For Hispanic women, it was 11.7 per 1,000. And for white women, it was 6.6 per 1,000."

So, from a different point of view, could it be said that children of color could be disproportionately saved by the Dobbs ruling?

A good part of the country, and not just in a few high legal circles, seem to think so.

A Vasectomy Historian on Why Male Sterilization Won’t Solve the Abortion Problem – MEL Magazine

Posted: at 9:31 am

On June 24th, the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade the landmark 1973 ruling that made safe, legal abortion a constitutional right making good on the leaked draft that predicted the move back in May. In the week since, people have taken to social media to respond in horror and to share urgent information about how those in restricted states can still access abortion.

Many of those expressing their anger have also echoed a common sentiment: that if women are forced to give birth, men should be forced to get mandatory vasectomies. For some, the intention behind this is to show the absurdity of politically controlling another persons body and reproductive choices something that many only deem intolerable when applied to men. Or, as one Twitter user eloquently put it: The vasectomy debate is a hypothetical meant to illustrate that people view infringements on the bodily autonomy of women as neutral, while infringements on the bodily autonomy of men as human rights violations.

However, others appear to be more serious in their calls for mandatory vasectomies, urging those who create sperm and can get someone pregnant to go get a vasectomy. Part of the allure, the more sincere tweets allege, is that vasectomies are reversible, meaning a guy of any age, with or without kids, could use it like a temporary contraceptive.

Except, this isnt invariably the case. As well as not always being reversible and, in rare cases, failing at preventing pregnancy vasectomies arent as easy to access as you might think. Men face many of the same barriers as women seeking sterilization, including resistance from doctors based on the fact that they might change their mind, as well as an astronomical expense if they do decide to (and are able to) reverse it. Likewise, calling for forced sterilization of any kind misses the point in the argument for everyone having bodily autonomy. Importantly, vasectomies dont solve the abortion debate just as any form of birth control isnt an alternative for abortion, a vasectomy doesnt reduce the need for an abortion when one is needed.

In response to all this, Georgia Grainger, a PhD student at Glasgows Centre for the Social History of Health & Healthcare who researches the history of vasectomies, shared a Twitter thread explaining why shes going to lose her shit if she sees one more feminist suggest mandatory vasectomies for men, that vasectomies prevent abortion or that vasectomies are any kind of solution to this situation. Unsurprisingly, her thread got a lot of heat, both from anti-abortion and pro-abortion activists alike.

So, to delve deeper into the controversial debate and learn why mandatory vasectomies arent a solution I asked Grainger to expand on her thread, share the history of forced sterilization in the U.S. and highlight some of the conversations we should be having instead.

At one point, there actually were mandatory vasectomies for some men in the U.S. Can you briefly explain the history of that?

Mandatory vasectomies in the U.S. began in 1899 with [a physician named] Dr. Sharp, who began vasectomizing inmates at the Indiana Reformatory in Jeffersonville. At first he thought it might change their behavior to make them less likely to be violent or sexual kind of like castrating a dog for behavioral problems because they didnt fully understand the impact of hormones yet. For the record, a vasectomy doesnt impact testosterone production at all, whereas castration [which removes the testicles and is a totally different procedure] does. But even castration doesnt make people less violent, as far as were aware, so none of it really worked the way Sharp thought it would.

However, after beginning these sterilizations for behavioral reasons, the rise of the ideology of eugenics that bad traits (like criminality or mental disability) could be bred out of people led to vasectomies being used for that in early 20th century America. Thinking that men (and women) in prison or institutions for disabled people must have undesirable traits that shouldnt be passed onto future generations, states began to bring in legislation to authorize eugenic sterilization: vasectomies for men, and tubal ligation or hysterectomies for women.

In total, 30 states had legislation for eugenic sterilization [at first, this was for prisoners and those in institutions, but after World War II, poor people and minorities were targeted, too]. Some had involuntary eugenic sterilization, where doctors could perform it without the patients consent, while others had voluntary eugenic sterilization, where patients were often promised shorter prison times or other benefits if they consented. But as many of those sterilized had developmental or mental disabilities, how much they could consent is unclear.

In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld the case Buck v. Bell which has never been overturned allowing non-consensual (compulsory) sterilization of the unfit (disabled people) in Virginia. Approximately 64,000 Americans were sterilized for eugenic reasons by 1963, with 39 percent of those being men given vasectomies. A disproportionate amount of those sterilized were people of color, with Black and Latinx people in particular being sterilized in huge numbers. Though this practice isnt well-known, disabled people can still be sterilized against their consent in 31 states not through old laws that have not been repealed, but through current and sometimes recently enacted laws.

Why, then, are mandatory vasectomies not a solution to the current abortion situation?

While I completely understand the anger of having our bodies controlled, I see a lot of people calling for mandatory vasectomies as a response, suggesting that men could have their vasectomies reversed when they want to be a father or, sometimes, when they prove theyre capable of being a father. These calls are usually not serious although Ive seen some people say they are completely serious and are instead to show how absurd abortion bans are.

However, there are a few issues I have with them. First is that they spread false information that vasectomies are just long-acting reversible contraceptives (like IUDs). This isnt true. A lot of vasectomies cant be reversed. But, beyond that, many men have been forcibly vasectomized throughout U.S. history as far as I understand, the estimates are over 30,000 men in the 20th century.

So mandatory vasectomies arent really a useful tool to show how absurd the abortion ban is, as theyve already been used legally for over a century in America. Many people calling for them arent aware of this aspect of U.S. history, because its not widely taught. So I think this is a really important time to educate people on the fact that what theyre satirically calling for has happened in recent U.S. history.

How did people respond to your Twitter thread criticizing calls for mandatory vasectomies?

Ive had hundreds of people tell me theyve learned a lot, and that they didnt know about the involuntary eugenic sterilization programs in U.S. history. Ive had some people say that even with that knowledge, theyd continue calling for mandatory sterilization, which is absolutely their choice, but I think the number of people saying they didnt know about it and would no longer use that argument really demonstrates why this kind of education is necessary.

Ive been surprised that some feminists were angry at me for, as they put it, centering the discussion on men. I can understand that anger especially at a time when there is so much anger to feel but Im only sharing my research specialism, which does happen to be about mens contraceptive choices, as well as responding to posts already centering men by suggesting we force vasectomies. Im not trying to make this about mens feelings at a time when I believe womens feelings and experiences should be forefront; instead Im trying to educate people about the reality of forced sterilization, and how its not as unlikely a scenario as people might think and that it has historically been used to disproportionately affect people of color and disabled people.

What do you think of the skyrocketing interest in vasectomies post Roe v. Wade being overturned?

Ive seen a lot of men talk about how this development has encouraged them to book their vasectomy consultation, which I think is fantastic. Vasectomies are a relatively low-risk option, and are as reliable as other contraceptive options. I definitely recommend that any men who dont want children, or who already have as many children as theyd like, think about whether a vasectomy is an option for them, and talk to their doctor about it.

However, the increased interest in mandatory vasectomies is upsetting, because it demonstrates how little people recognize that, historically, restricted reproductive rights for women have also come alongside restricted reproductive rights for marginalized men. Yes, the men on the Supreme Court are unlikely to ever be subjected to mandatory vasectomies, but there are thousands of men across the U.S. who a lot of the conservative right-wing would probably be quite happy to vasectomize, and I dont think we should encourage them even as a rhetorical device.

What conversations about vasectomies, birth control and abortion should we be having instead?

Something that a lot of women dont realize is how difficult it can be for men to even access vasectomies. Were used to being told that were too young, will change our minds and other patronizing things when we ask for permanent sterilization options, and I think its easy to assume that men wouldnt be told that, but they are. Ive heard from countless men whove tried to get a vasectomy but were told they had to be over 35 if they didnt have children, or over 30 if they did, and that theyd have to have their wifes permission, or, if they werent married, they wouldnt be approved for one.

So, along with better provision of contraceptive options for women and fewer restrictions on access to them, we also need to be making it easier for men to take responsibility when they want to. We need reproductive choice for everyone.

I know you dont have a ton of abortion access where you are either. How does it feel watching the events in America unfold? Whats it been like in the U.K.?

Its difficult to watch. Im from Northern Ireland, which has never had legal access to abortion; recently abortion itself was decriminalized there, but theres no actual health-care provision for it (no abortion clinics, doctors, etc.), so pregnant people still have to travel to England to get an abortion. Theres also been an uptick in anti-abortion protests in Scotland where I live now alongside an increase in right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ rights.

Though not as severe as the shift in the U.S, I think our anti-choice, anti-queer campaigners are being encouraged by the developments in the U.S, and are seeing it as their time to be louder here too, which is scary. It demonstrates how international these ideas and trends are, and how important it is for us to learn from and support one another. A lot of campaigners in Europe especially in Ireland and Poland have spent decades campaigning for abortion rights and providing illegal-but-safe abortions, so theres a lot of knowledge and strategies there for American campaigners to pull from as well. Theres solidarity on this side of the Atlantic for American women right now, as we know the struggles all too well.

Brit Dawson is a London-based journalist who mostly writes about sex, women's rights and sex work. She is also the staff writer at Dazed.

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Disabled People Never Had Full Autonomy Over Our Reproductive Rights – Teen Vogue

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In this op-ed, Anja Herrman explores why disabled people should be centered in the fight for reproductive rights.

While my generation has, up until now, always had the right to a legal abortion, not all of us were able to exercise it. On June 24, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to legislate away abortion rights. But for disabled people like me, Roe was never enough, as the government has long legislated our reproductive health away. As many of us now rally for the restoration of our rights, we must center the voices of disabled people. Were still fighting for the kind of freedom that most Americans take for granted.

The United States has a long history of trying to control people with disabilities. In the early 1900s, supporters of the eugenics movement advocated for the forced sterilization of anyone they believed to be unfit in order to preserve good bloodlines. Who was fit or unfit? Largely, anyone who wasnt a wealthy, white, nondisabled person. The eugenics movement was supported (even encouraged!) by the U.S. government. In 1927, the Court decided in Buck v. Bell that the government was within their rights to sterilize people declared disabled, because three generations of imbeciles are enough. This abhorrent repudiation of disabled people's humanity is one of the most shameful in our countrys history but its far from over. A recent report by the National Womens Law Center found that 31 states (and Washington DC) explicitly allow the forced sterilization of disabled people. Laws like these destroy the idea that disabled people should be able to make these choices for ourselves and instead allow others to manipulate our bodies.

Though Im young, I have always seen parenting in my future, but this possibility may be denied to me because of my disability. In the U.S., a parents disability is sometimes considered in determining custody cases. When he was a judge on the DC Court of Appeals, now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh decided in Doe ex. rel. Tarlow v. District of Columbia that DCs statute allowing the principality to forcibly perform an abortion on an intellectually disabled individual was constitutional, thus denying a disabled woman a chance at being a mother. Tarlow shows how the fight against Roe has never been about babies, but about control. Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe.

This isnt to say that a disabled person cant also be forced to become a parent. Disabled people are much more vulnerable to sexual assault than their nondisabled peers. Now, in a post-Roe world, this means that I could be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy resulting from assault to term.

As we rally around abortion rights, its crucial that we center disabled people to achieve real justice. To truly accept and include disabled people like me, there needs to be a recognition that abortion isnt the only thing we need to have true control over our reproductive lives. Instead of letting me make my own reproductive health choices, lawmakers have become far too comfortable with policing bodies like mine.

As a disabled teen, I deserve to be able to make choices about my body and my future. Im asking pro-choice advocates to see the value of including disability in our fight for change. If disabled people dont get a seat at the table, then future generations wont truly have the right to choose. Its time to get the government out of disabled peoples uteruses once and for all.

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The rise of reactionaries in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic – Crosscut

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The Jazz Age was flourishing, thanks in part to new Prohibition laws. In Seattle, the so-called Jackson Street nightclub and speakeasy scene took off, spreading from Pioneer Square to the Central District and eventually birthing more than a generation of great music and musicians. But while the races exuberantly mixed in the after-midnight hours at clubs like the Black and Tan, nationally and locally reactionary racial politics took hold. By day, the segregating redlines in the city were steadfast and racist covenants spread.

Politically, the white middle class yearned for normalcy, which brought a sequence of conservative Republican presidents, including Calvin Coolidge, Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover, all of whom carried Washington state. But normalcy for many people meant a return to aggressive white supremacy. In some cases, Washington led the way.

The Ku Klux Klan revived in the 20s. Once mostly limited to the South, it found new enthusiasts in the white middle class of the far West and Midwest. The KKK took over towns and state houses, including for a time Oregons. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-modernity, theKlan became a powerful force that paraded openly in the streets and rallied tens of thousands of people to witness late-night cross-burnings in places like Issaquah, Yakima and Renton.Some events attracted 30,000 or more people.

Seattle author Timothy Egan has written a book about the 1920s Klan revival, A Fever in the Heartland, due out next spring. Some five million Americans joined the 1920s KKK. In 1924, the Democratic delegations from Washington, Oregon and Idaho together unanimously opposed a plank in the partys platform that would repudiate Klan violence.

New anti-immigration laws targeting Asians were passed to keep America white. The Northwest had been founded on race-based policies that impacted who could settle here and who could homestead. In 1921, the Washington Legislaturepassed the first law since statehood aimed at cracking down on Japanese immigrants by revoking their right to lease or rent land. A Washington Congressman, Albert Johnson, shepherded a bill through Congress, the Immigration Act of 1924, that essentially halted all Asian immigration. Johnson called it a bulwark against alien blood. These kinds of bills had strong support from both the KKK and the general public.

The year of the immigration act also saw the election of a conservative Republican governor in Washington, Roland Hartley, an Everett politician and timberman who broke with the progressive wing of the GOP. Historian Dave M. Buerge has written, The 1924 campaign was a particularly grotesque one in Washington politics, with the Ku Klux Klan fomenting hatred against blacks, foreigners, Jews, and Catholics. Government intervention in private life during the war had fostered a backlash.

Hartley capitalized. He was anti-labor, anti-tax and anti-government when he couldnt control it with his autocratic ways. He slashed funding for the state highway department and for public schools, and he almost drove the University of Washington into the ground by cutting its budgets and seizing control of its board of regents. He bullied and name-called his enemies, though Im not sure anyone today would be insulted by being called a pusillanimous blatherskite.

Not only was Washington a leader in opposing nonwhite immigration and hounding people of color with legal restrictions and burning crosses, it was also an early adopter in 1909 of eugenics laws which took choice away from some Americans by installing a system of involuntary sterilizations. In 1921, the state Legislature tookan even harsher stand against the unfit with a broadened list of who could be forcibly sterilized, including the feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts. Such laws received U.S. Supreme Court sanction under the Buck v. Bell decision of 1927 when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously declared that three generations of imbeciles is enough to justify sterilizing women as it turned out,mostly poor Black women. Nearly 700 Washingtonians were sterilized under state law until the practice ended here in the 1940s. More than 2,600 in Oregon were sterilized until the early 1980s.

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Play the Best Cryptocurrency Roulette – Eye On Annapolis – Eye On Annapolis

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With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, the first video game to reach the level of commercial success was roulette. It was a computer program that randomly selected numbers and allowed for placing bets on the various numbers as if the player was playing roulette in reality. However, this game became very popular only after the release of video games with a high level of difficulty. Since its launch date, roulette remains one of the most popular games for players from around the globe.

The number of people interested in playing roulette has increased significantly. Today, popular crypto casinos offer cryptocurrency roulette as part of their gambling assortment. If you are up for giving a try to an online roulette game, let us help you make your gambling experience as smooth and effective as possible. In this post, we will look into what it takes to win in the game and how to make your gameplay successful.

Roulette is played with a large wheel with 37 slots numbered from 0 to 36 being on it. The game has several types of bets that can be made with either one or several numbers. A player can place bets on zero, on a single number, or on one or several numbers at once. The main goal in the game is to predict a cell on a roulette wheel where the ball will land. Of course, the more bets you make, the higher your winning chances will be. But keep in mind that you will have to pay for each bet. So, make a balanced decision in this regard.

There are a total of 36 cells on a gaming wheel, and any number can be chosen for a bet. When placing a bet, make sure that you are aware of the min and max limits and that you stick to the general rules. Otherwise, an online casino will not be able to accept your bet, and you may lose an opportunity to land a grand prize in the game.

Apart from the above bets, there is a certain number of no wagers that can be placed, which includes the double bet. As a rule, these wagers are placed with a maximum bet and, when a number matches the winning combo, the winnings are added to your bankroll. The sum of these different wagers results in the payouts. Since roulette is a game of luck, it is almost impossible to predict a winning combo. But staying attentive to a roulette wheel is always a good thing. This approach will help you read the winning sequence and the most potentially profitable winning combos. Thats why it is always best to start your gameplay for free and then switch to BTC bets.

7BitCasino casino offers both mobile and desktop versions of your favorite game, and you can switch between different game types with just one click. So, once you feel bored with playing European roulette, you can go to an American version of the game. If you are done there as well, there are live dealer game variations run by different dealers.

Another reason why you should choose 7BitCasino is live dealer roulette. And there is more than just one live dealer roulette game at your disposal, where the actual betting and random selection of numbers take place in real-time. So, if you want to feel the atmosphere of a real land-based casino and freely communicate with a croupier, then this is a good option. On top of that, it is worth mentioning that 7BitCasino uses the most modern software to give players the best experience, which is quite promising.

Roulette is becoming more and more popular because the game itself is simple. This is the first thing that will be attractive to new and inexperienced players. In addition, this game offers players many opportunities to win. Therefore, if you are looking for simple but at the same time interesting crypto casino gambling entertainment, then roulette is the best choice.

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Origin of the Roulette Wheel Sonoma Sun | Sonoma, CA – Sonoma Valley Sun

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Posted on July 2, 2022 by Allen Brown

It is still a mystery about the origin of the Roulette wheel, but a few theories have been going around regarding the same. The most popular and widely believed by the majority is that the game was created by the French Math Wizard named Blaise Pascal in the 17th century. He was not trying to invent a casino game but the perpetual motion machine. Pascal was an inventor and had lots of ideas, but this one failed. But, in the process, it gave birth to the most popular casino game to date.

However, some evidence shows that several other ancient civilizations already played the game, which was quite similar to modern-day roulette.

Soldiers Killing Time in Rome:

Ancient Roman soldiers did not have an exciting life as it was already short due to their occupational hazards, and they had to watch their friends getting injured or dead in the battle. Their morals were down, which further reduced their effectiveness on the battlefield. Hence Roman commanders let the soldiers have as much fun as possible by even participating in gambling games, and many of those games involved spinning a chariot wheel which could be the origin of roulette.

The Chinese Theory:

Several people have very different beliefs. According to them, the Chinese board game that included 37 animal figurines into a magic square which, when totaled, was 666, is what inspired roulette. The modern roulette wheel adds up to 666, which does not seem coincidental to many. The game was discovered by Dominican monks and later brought to Europe. Slight modifications were made later on to form the roulette.

Ancient Greeks Soldiers Were Gambling Too:

Greek soldiers also had gambling games to boost their morals during battles. One of their games is pretty similar to modern-day roulette. They played the game with a shield by drawing symbols inside the shield, then putting it face down on the ground by placing an arrow next to it. The shield would be spun, and the bet would be on the symbol that the arrow points to. Does this not sound very similar to roulette? These soldier games resemble the modern roulette very closely, but there is not much evidence that could support these theories.

The Addition of Zero:

The name suggests that roulette is of French origin, and the design and gameplay are influenced by two similar games popular in 17th century Europe named Roly Poly and Even-Odd, as these games involved spinning the wheel and betting on the outcome of the spin. Pascals interest in gambling was well known, making the origin story more convincing.

A fun fact is that the original roulette created by Pascal did not include zero. It was later added in the mid-9th century when Francois and Lois Blanc designed a roulette wheel with a single zero, giving the house a bigger edge. Meanwhile, King Charles III of Monaco was facing financial troubles and built a casino and bought a roulette wheel to solve the problem. This made the game popular among aristocrats and royalty.At the same time, gambling was outlawed in France, which made gambling in Monte Carlo more desirable.

Roulette Comes to America:

In the 1800s, roulette made it across the ocean to the U.S. shores as European settlers who had landed in Louisiana introduced it to the Americans. However, the casino game was not as smoothly accepted in the U.S. as it did in Europe, as the casino providers were unhappy with a 5.26% house edge. Hence, they increased it by adding double zero to the Roulette wheel. This means instead of 37 numbers that you could see on the European wheel, the American Roulette wheel would have 38 numbers (1 through 36, 0, and 00). However, this annoyed the players as they lost interest due to low earnings and started playing games they could actually beat, like blackjack.

Roulette in Online Casinos:

As gambling became popular, online gambling would surely succeed, as it offered players to enjoy thousands of games from their homes. Mostly slots rule most online casinos, but they also offer table games, and roulette and its variants always make the cut because of its popularity. It is a classic game that many gamblers enjoy to date. Also, the advent of live online casinos has even made it much more interesting, as the players get the feel of actually playing inside a land casino. Different types of roulette, such as European and American, can be played despite geographical location, which is another advantage of playing online.

The Bottom Line:

Roulette is one of the oldest casino games and is still popular amongst gambling players. It is a game of chance without proven strategies to beat it, but spinning the wheel has its own charm. Our ancestors knew the excitement players have after spinning the wheel and waiting to get lucky, which is why this game is amongst the greater casino games even today.

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Daily Archives: July 7, 2022

Plural Like the Universe – City Journal

There’s a straight line from eugenics to ‘biblical family values’ to white supremacy and the anti-abortion movement – Baptist News Global

Viewpoint: In response to historical misuse of genetics to defend eugenics, some egalitarians call for defunding. Here’s why that’s not the solution -…

To Be or Not to Be a Mother: A Timeless Question with New Urgency – Justia Verdict

Another point of view – Arkansas Online

A Vasectomy Historian on Why Male Sterilization Won’t Solve the Abortion Problem – MEL Magazine

Disabled People Never Had Full Autonomy Over Our Reproductive Rights – Teen Vogue

The rise of reactionaries in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic – Crosscut

Play the Best Cryptocurrency Roulette – Eye On Annapolis – Eye On Annapolis

Origin of the Roulette Wheel Sonoma Sun | Sonoma, CA – Sonoma Valley Sun

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