Sometimes a Racist, Always a Slut
Should pro-lifers keep citing Margaret Sanger’s scathingly racist statements, and her program of eugenics—which directly influenced Hitler, and led to laws in a dozen or so American states forcibly sterilizing or even castrating thousands of the “unfit” who flunked primitive I.Q. tests? Good question.
What matters most is whether such a rhetorical attack works at undermining liberal and non-white support for abortion. In my own long experience in the pro-life movement, it is occasionally useful, but rarely conclusive. It helps sow doubt about the motives of one’s opponents, and might tilt the occasional lefty towards becoming more ambivalent about abortion and population control, but I’ve never seen it change anyone’s mind—any more than someone who is solidly pro-life would change his convictions if he came to believe in Freaknomics’ spurious claim that abortion helps cut crime.
Marcus Epstein raises an interesting question when he asks if harping on Sanger’s racism does harm in other areas. Does it feed into what we might call the Left’s “anti-Southern Strategy,” which entails hunting down and denouncing every trace even of group identification among European Americans, while coddling and profiting from outright racism and bigotry among every other ethnicity?
Well, maybe. But that’s not the real problem with tarring today’s Planned Parenthood with its founder’s ethnic obsessions. Instead, it this: Attacking an organization that kills tens of thousands of children every year because it might, just might, be a little racist is simply a joke. And in very poor taste—like denouncing Hitler for destroying German typography. As I’ve written elsewhere, compared to legal abortion, the whole of Jim Crow was a fart in a bathtub. Even slavery paled. We need to make this point over and over again—and not to undermine it by our own tactics.
Marcus cites Sanger’s own disingenuous statements opposing abortion—made back when the word itself was a profanity. Should we believe her? The organization she founded started promoting and performing abortions just a few years after her death—and was presided over by her grandson, Alexander, whom I’ve cheerfully heckled in Manhattan. Should we believe that the group run by her friends and appointees betrayed her deep respect for unborn life, and turned 180 degrees promptly after her death? It seems implausible. Had the Jesuits immediately after Ignatius’ death become Anglicans en masse, we might be justified in suspecting the work of their founder. To ratchet things up a bit: Had the 12 Apostles, three years after Pentecost, joined the cult of Dionysios, along with all their followers, what inference might we draw? Anyone who has ever worked in practical politics knows that there are stances you take publicly, and those you hold privately—waiting for the debate to shift far enough in your direction, so you can take down the “hard stuff” from the top shelf. Gay rights activists weren’t asking for marriage licenses 30 years ago; their supporters would angrily deny such implications. This just meant the public wasn’t “ready” for this proposal, which would come with time.
Based on everything I’ve read (a lot) about Sanger’s life and works, this sounds to me like what underlay her “pro-life” stance. Had her belief been sincere, surely at least one of her close associates in Planned Parenthood would have resigned, or made a stink, or something, when the group went into the profitable business of abortion. Instead, not a peep.
But there’s only a limited usefulness in focusing on Sanger’s racist positions. Not because a host of other Americans held onto crackpot eugenicist theories in her day. Indeed, she was one of the main figures helping to spread such ideas. Far from a passive recipient of a tainted cultural commonplace, Sanger crusaded to inform American WASPs of the “genetic threat” posed by Southern Europeans, Jews, blacks, and other races.
No, the problem is that most people realize that racial eugenics aren’t really at the heart of what Planned Parenthood does today—whatever grim racial anxieties might stir in the souls of Botoxed Republican hags who write that organization checks. As Robert G. Marshall and Charles A. Donovan document in their definitive history of the birth control movement, Blessed Are the Barren, Sanger began as a sexual radical and libertine, a close associate of early sexologist Havelock Ellis. A wife who abandoned her husband and young children to travel Europe and conduct a series of casual affairs, Sanger was an apostle of “free love” before the term was even invented. Her philosophical inspiration was not Houston Stuart Chamberlain, but the Marquis de Sade.
Sanger had campaigned for sexual license for years before she discovered the handy “wedge” issue of Anglo anxiety over immigration and differential birth rates. A savvy political activist, she trumped up a minor panic over “dysgenic” births and “hereditary” criminality in order to break down the social taboo against even discussing birth control which prevailed among most Protestants before the Anglican Council of Lambeth broke the dam, and offered the first tentative approval of contraception in the history of Christendom. As Blessed Are the Barren shows in exhausting detail, Sanger used the tribal fear of displacement on the part of Protestant elites to undermine their theological position—which they’d inherited from Luther and Calvin, and Augustine long before them. Odd as it sounds today, Sanger used racism to make birth control respectable. Of course, given the numbers of men like my grandfather who were arriving every day, Anglo Protestants had good reason to fear displacement. Instead of anti-human measures like sterilization, they should have looked to immigration control--and so Congress did, in 1926. Americans had (and have) a perfect right to enact such laws if they choose, on whatever grounds seem prudent to them. The fear of being displaced by alien cultures is plenty good reason to tighten up the border--but not to sterilize human beings like cattle. Equating such measures (as Sanger did, and the modern Left does) is nonsense on stilts.
And Sanger abandoned the race issue pretty readily, too. As the Nazi crimes against humanity were exposed after World War II, Sanger dropped her Klan hood like last year’s hat, and donned the white coat of a futurist; she “discovered” that the reason why birth control was so urgently important was not the swelling ranks of dusky Sicilians and blacks, but rather the “population explosion.” Without missing a beat, her organization shifted its rhetoric, and provoked another panic—one which ironically enough, has helped contracept the white race to the brink of extinction. Experts like Paul Erhlich appeared on Johnny Carson predicting mass famines throughout the 1970s, and the collapse of civilization. Their warnings never came true—but what did it matter? The “meme” had taken root, and pushed forward Planned Parenthood’s agenda; indeed, it was the Rockefeller Commission’s infamous report on population that helped sway Justice Blackmun to change his position on abortion, and write the decision in Roe v. Wade.
All of this is not to say that there is no limit to human population, or that no response was necessary to the happy collapse in infant mortality that marked the late 19th century. (My grandmother was an exception--bearing 12 kids, of whom only 5 lived to adulthood. But that was the norm before the late 19th century.) Ironically, the Catholic Church moved to accommodate this reality by the mid-20th century, approving the use of a method of family planning that worked with (instead of against) the Natural Law, and relied on occasional self-denial rather than hormones and surgery. Doctrine often develops in response to heresies; we wouldn’t have the Nicene Creed without the Arians who denied the divinity of Christ. What is more, the Church moved much more quickly to offer a sane response to this new development than she had on previous issues, such as usury. Sadly, too few Christians bother to think about the moral implications of technologically interfering with fertility—and in doing so, they align themselves with the likes of Sanger against the Fathers (and Reformers) of their own churches.
The fact is that Sanger and her followers cynically exploited racial anxieties for almost 30 years to promote their agenda of sexual liberation—before changing tactics. If we can cite those old disgraceful pamphlets to teach our contemporaries not to trust this organization, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. But we ought not to expect too much.
There’s a deeper issue buried beneath all the filth of racism, lies and promiscuity in which Planned Parenthood sank its roots, and it is this: The old Whig vision of an America which could do without Faith or even the virtues was never more than a fantasy. The “invisible hand” of the free market can help generate wealth, but it does not produce “spontaneous order” in society; in fact, without the constraints of deep religious piety and common cultural codes, competitors in the market economy resemble less the Bees of Mandeville’s fable than the termites that eat away the load-bearing walls of your house. When Western elites began to apply the implications of their own individualist ideology to matters of the heart, the result was the near-total collapse of the family. As the decadence that infected coteries like Margaret Sanger’s and Alfred Kinsey’s filtered down into the middle classes, and then into the poor, the results should have been predictable.
By the middle 1960s (see Moynihan’s report on the black family) reality began to kick down the door. Urban pathologies, funded and made possible by a judgment-free welfare state, began to make the best American cities unliveable. In embracing attitudes toward sex that erode any self-restraint and demean the sanctity of marriage, Western elites had unleashed social problems that would haunt their grand-children—an epidemic of illegitimacy and a massive dependent underclass that bred habitual criminals, and among middle class people shattered families that bred children afraid of commitment, who in turn would fail to reproduce themselves.
The blithe rejection at once of biology and morality that underlay Sanger’s call for “liberation” of “the sex instinct” was incompatible with a free society. I think that on some level she knew this—which is why she was more than willing to use the coercive power of the State to neuter, control, and selectively breed the unruly poor. All this was in service of her squalid, upper-middle class dream—which was dramatized best by the dreary, wife-swapping couples of Ang Lee’s brilliant, miserable The Ice Storm. Some libertarians profess puzzlement that prosperous leftists support at once social libertinism and a pervasive bureaucratic, Nanny State—seeing here philosophical inconsistency. Maybe so. But existentially, a state without the private virtues can only survive through the continual growth of an all-knowing, all-seeing State. And that’s the key to Margaret Sanger’s venereal creed.
Comments
But really do you think there is even the hint of a chance that people will ever learn the real truth behind planned parenthood? It was a temporary tactic and as you pointed out they easily shifted to other fears such as population. Ironically the planned parenthood crowd often try to paint their opponents as racist for condemning the black population to children that they cannot afford and other such foolishness. What most liberals do not know is that the state provides everything that a family needs to live. I once rented to a wellfare family of white people and the amazing thing was that even though none of them worked they had plenty of money. Plenty to eat, and a nice place to stay. So what did they do with all that they had? Sat on my porch drinking and smoking all day while the state watched the kids for them and while I was out working to pay for the house and to provide for my own son. Did they attend any of the numerous free events put on by the city? No. Did they frequent all the free education and job training the city offers? No. Did they bring their kids to the park up the street? No. The collected money from the government, food stamps, took advantage of a sucker landlord, and sat around drinking and smoking and screaming obscenities at each other all day. I often think it is no wonder that immigrants come here and in a couple of years they are on top of the game. The ycome here with religion and old world values and therefore have a huge leg up on our static population of atheized poor who see no problem in spending their free money on vices and ignoring their children.
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John has made a brilliant and historically confirmable point, which I suggest en passant
in After Liberalism. The ideology of the entire Progressive Era undergoes a radical
facelift after the Second World War, and the obvious overlaps with Nazism are replaced
with something foreshadowing the current Left. Thus eugenicists favoring government
assistance to overhaul the human race start to advocate social planning based on
anti-racism and environmental determinism. The feminist movement
goes from defending the single family wage to attacking sexist gender roles and calling
on the state to overturn the rigid nuclear family. What seems to fuel the change
is more than a certain bizarre form of “antifascism.” Egalitarian fanaticism also seems
to lie at the heart of this transformation of the Left. But what remains the same is
the attempt to enlist public administration in a war against the Christian bourgeois
family and other inherited social institutions.
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Now *that* was a tight piece of writing.
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At the end of the day, living beside a culture with a collective attention span of a child with so called ADD or ADHD, does the “pro-life” movement really need to focus on the supposed underlying racism of pro-abortionist to make its point? It’s too cute by half. In fact,conflating racism with abortion obfuscates the whole issue. The issue is about life not about race: what’s gained by conflating abortion and racism?
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All good points. I don’t like this argument because it smacks of the basic leftist formula: nothing is worse than racism. Thus, OJ Simpson gets interviewed in Esquire and criminals like Michael Vick get sympathy and there is earnest discussion of how they can make a comeback, but Mel Gibson is persona non grata, consigned to his own studio lot for a few foul words.
The left proposes an aristocracy based not on merit, birth, moral excellence, courage, wealth, or technocratic ability, but rather an aristocracy based solely on having the right opinions. It’s less strenuous and less successful, not least because many of the opinions in question are wrong or easily misapplied.
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“a war against the Christian bourgeois
family and other inherited social institutions.”
I’m wondering if either Dr. Gottfried or Mr. Zmirak would comment on the transformation of the epithet “bourgeois” to mean something quite different than what it originally meant.
That is, when I use the term, I admit I often use it perjoratively, with something of an image of servile-minded people living lives of bovine contentment as consumers and wage-slaves in an industrial hive; I’m now more inclined to think that the class of people I think of as “bourgeois” are in fact more indicative of the type of New Man that Marxists were attempting to create.
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I guess what I’m driving at is an irony which just occurred to me: leftists sneering at “the bourgeois” on one hand and extolling the importance of independently-owned coffee-shops on the other.
After all, aren’t independent coffee-houses *incredibly* bourgeois, in the sense that Marx used the term?
Off-topic, sorry.
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An outstanding essay.
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The juvenile headline of this piece seems out of synch with the excellent text, in tone at least.
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“Attacking an organization that kills tens of thousands of children every year because it might, just might, be a little racist is simply a joke.”
Not really. By exposing the genealogy of Planned Parenthood and the preference of it’s current apparatchiks to inflict death rather than allow one to suffer life within a bad school district, prolifers are bringing an important truth to light and engendering “second thoughts” within the powerful, but contradictory coalition that sustains the culture of death. The “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” offers a sharp contrast to the anti-Christian mentality that under girds our Managerial Class. There should have no qualms about using it to awaken those who should know the true nature of the choice before them. The fact that Jesse Jackson and demagogues of his ilk threw in with radical, white upper-middle class feminists is a story that can’t be told enough. For a lot of reasons.
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If her Wikipedia photo does her justice, she was certainly no looker! Sluts ought to be made of sterner stuff!
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The best thing you have written on this site,in my opinion, John.
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The old Whig vision of an America which could do without Faith or even the virtues was never more than a fantasy. The “invisible hand” of the free market can help generate wealth, but it does not produce “spontaneous order” in society —Dr. Zmirak
Amen! Finally some real Burkean Conservatism. Paine’s “natural society” is a myth.
I often think it is no wonder that immigrants come here and in a couple of years they are on top of the game. The ycome [sic] here with religion and old world values and therefore have a huge leg up on our static population of atheized [sic] or who see no problem in spending their free money on vices and ignoring their children.—Nucci
Worth reflecting upon.
Sorry Mr. Roach, we get into a morally questionable game when we say one evil (abortion) is worse than another (racialism). Intrinsic evil is aways evil and must always be opposed. One intrinsic evil is not less evil than another in terms of human action.
Racialism and abortion are intrinsic evils. And eugenicsis aways racialist, always abortionist, and infanticidal, and so aways intrinsically evil—even if Sanger distanced herself from racialism. And sorry, Dr. Gottfried, the home and birthplace of the these evils was on the “Right”; and to the degree that they have been adopted by the “Left” (as also ethnic nationalism) only proves what I have argued elsewhere: The “Left” is becoming “Right”, and thus the concepts “Left” and “Right” are meaningless.
PS: No one was more anti-bourgeoisie than Benito and ‘Dolf. What makes European politics vastly more interesting than American is that to be anti-bourgeois can come from the “Right” (fascism and Fascism), the “Left”, and from above (the Blancs and certain Catholic Noirs)
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Zmirak makes some good points that reference to Sanger’s remarks on abortion and eugenics isn’t going to help anything, and that most probably these remarks were disingenuous.
There is still a strong pro-abortion minority in the Republican Party...note that the California Republican Party has supported abortion-on-demand for years. The idea being that it is better for Blacks and Hispanics to abort their pregancies rather then add to the welfare roles, and the population of low-paid, low skill workers that can’t generate enough tax income to pay for the social services they consume.
Perhaps Epstein or Zmirak might want to examine the pro-abortion minority on the right as well.
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G.S.’s comments on the “servile” and “bovine” bourgeoisie could only be uttered by an anti-bourgeois. Indeed, bourgeois cultures have a tendency of creating anti-bourgeois haters, or resenters who enjoy the privileges of the civilization while they despise its alleged vulgarity (think of Sartre and Simone, or Barack and Michelle). The coffee-house lumpen are a perfect example of this, as are certain rightists on the site who hate America while they enjoy her benefits. Yes indeed, Sid, anti-bourgeois hatred spans the political spectrum, as does support for abortion.
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It seems the neo-con war in Iraq and the so called forever war on “terrorism” is another example of lies built on lies and shifting sand. Yet in spite of all evidence to the contrary the death machine continues.
It seems easy to move hearts to be pro-death but will take a miracle or the passing of the evil generation to steer hearts to life. The seamless garment is still caught in a tug of war by those who ignore the crucified above them.
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Wow, John Zmirak’s on fire.
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When I was at University in the early nineties, many of my friends worked at a local community for the ‘developmentally disabled’. From what I gathered, every female of fertile age was on de subcutaneous deproprovera (sp?). Why? Cause they would, given the chance, screw like minxes and get pregnant with children they could could not take care of and whom would stand a good chance of inheriting any organic disorders the woman herself had (or the male that impregnated her) . Don’t ask me why, but apparently this place was co-ed. So I Was this practice wise—i.e. the depro? Seems to me it was.
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All evils are not the same, as evidenced by the Catholic Chruch’s distinction of mortal and venal sins. But even in ordinary parlance, evil thoughts and wrong-headed opinions--such as much racism--is many times less harmful and less willful than murdering one’s own child.
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Marie-Claire,
Perhaps I expressed myself poorly.
My point was that the term “bourgeois” has, thanks to incessant Marxist usage of it as a slur, come to mean *by definition* a people who are servile and bovine in character.
By contrast, the proper & original meaning may actually refer to independent-minded property-owners, like the kulaks (landowning peasantry) whom Lenin sought to liquidate in Russia.
Or it could refer to enterprising guys who open their own independent bars, stores, or coffee-shops. Hence the irony of the hippies who hang out in such shops denigrating the bourgeoisie.
I was, in fact, trying to generate some insights by highlighting what I am now inclined to see as my own error.
But thanks anyhow for piling on with a heaping helping of scorn and tossing me in with Jean-Paul Sartre and the “America-Haters”. You’re a true patriot.
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Thanks to this article, Ann Stone’s zoominfo page is now the #1 Google search result for “botoxed republican hag”.
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evil thoughts and wrong-headed opinions
Is Mr. Roach ignorant that racialism (a collection of thoughts and opinions)has killed millions? That antisemitism is a form of racialism? Or are we soon to expect Holocaust Denial on this website? Or that evil hardly is mitigated by a lesser number of its victims? I once came close to punching out a Lefty who claimed that “only” 20,000 were killed in the French Revolution.
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Excellent essay John.
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Sid, knock it off. Yes, even some mortal sins are worse than others. Murder is
worse than adultery.
Secondly, stop it with this obsessive concern with what you’ll see next on this website.
It’s annoying, and makes everyone want to see only one thing next—fewer of these
paranoid, slippery-slope posts of yours.
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So, after all the back and forth over this issue, is it o.k. to have MLK’s daughter on our side? http://www.kingforamerica.com/ Seems like a no-brainer to me.
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The difference between racism/racialism and abortion is that the former, sometimes, though rarely, leads to the killing of another, while the later always leads to the killing of another. In the cases in the former where someone killed out of racism then yes, of course it is the same as abortion.
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Sid, that “Lefty” would have kicked your ass.
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That’s really good M. Nucci.
Still waiting, though. Who among you wants the 65 IQ girl, with additional problems mental, taken off the subcutaneous Depo-Provera? Hands up now? Who is willing to foot the cost, financially, metally, of the offspring?
Sanger didn’t have the Depo, but really and truly the effect is the same isn’t it. Keeping those who really ain’t up to it from having kids.
Or heck, I remember hearing a white woman, with a black husband and mixed race kids, starting a campaign to pay crack mothers to go on the Depo. Oh, here’s a another. No doubt this is a gross violation of the Natural Law and God’s Law. Let the crack addicts proliferate. Barbara Harris and Laura Love—those evil white womyn haggly and botoxed, trying to genocide the Black Race. For shame.
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RE: Stari,
I can certainly see why it’s TEMPTING to put such women on birth control. But the best answer to that was given by Jean Vanier, who founded a string of Christian communities for retarded persons around the world. In his book on the subject, “Man and Woman He Created Them,” Vanier writes that putting such women on birth control is basically a bureaucratic measure designed to get administrators “off the hook,” so they don’t have to protect these women from being sexually exploited by other patients… or staff members. Disgusting as that is, it happens ALL THE TIME, apparently. Should we be giving these helpless girls dangerous drugs in order to cover up the results of such abuse?
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Excellent article, Mr. Zmirak. You made all the relevant points perfectly. To answer the question you posed at the beginning: yes, we should continue to reveal this despicable woman and the equally awful organization she founded in all their ugliness.
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“putting such women on birth control is basically a bureaucratic measure.”
Recently I was talking to a Marine officer who was telling me that the military is
now giving women temporary sterilization shots while they operate in the Iraqi theatre
so they don’t get pregnant when messing around or raped.
You’ve come a long way baby.
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Zmirak: “Marcus Epstein raises an interesting question when he asks if harping on Sanger’s racism does harm in other areas. Does it feed into what we might call the Left’s “anti-Southern Strategy,” which entails hunting down and denouncing every trace even of group identification among European Americans, while coddling and profiting from outright racism and bigotry among every other ethnicity?”
Christopher Roach: “All good points. I don’t like this argument because it smacks of the basic leftist formula: nothing is worse than racism. Thus, OJ Simpson gets interviewed in Esquire and criminals like Michael Vick get sympathy and there is earnest discussion of how they can make a comeback, but Mel Gibson is persona non grata, consigned to his own studio lot for a few foul words. The left proposes an aristocracy based not on merit, birth, moral excellence, courage, wealth, or technocratic ability, but rather an aristocracy based solely on having the right opinions. It’s less strenuous and less successful, not least because many of the opinions in question are wrong or easily misapplied.”
Great points.
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Passionate, beautiful essay, John. Sanger also, we often forget, hated men, except for some equipment they could bring to her lusts. Her progressive dream, which she actually lived long enough to see come true, was to liberate women from their biological natures. Talk about changing the world!
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Cid, your above post is without foundation and rests upon leftist dogma. Racism is not a crime, nor is it listed in the Ten Commandments as a sin. Further, name one era or culture in history that has accomplished or even sought to accomplish total equality. Within the present, sick West, it has not been achieved. Through discrimination in the name of forced equality (affirmative action, race set-asides, etc.), the entire attempt at equality and diversity is a reversal and a joke. Laws pertaining to racism are in reality discriminatory since they are not applied to all, but to only one race and nationality exclusively. During the last LA riots it was noted that blacks singled out and targeted Orientals for violence and theft. Yet no one described this as racist since it was not done by the only race supposedly capable of racism. It seems clear that ideas of equality and diversity are enlightened ideas that deny human nature and can only be achieved through government controls.
More surprising is your attempt to place racism on the same level as abortion. Obviously God places all violations of the Ten Commandments on the same level. However, murder is on that list; racism is not. Further, all crimes are not equal within the judicial. A pervert that rapes and murders a nine year old commits a felony and may, justly, receive the death penalty. Petty theft, on the other hand, would receive a much milder punishment. Your attempt to call murder and racism equal evils is an absurd attempt to blur the differences and elevate thought crimes to dangerous heights. John is correct in his assessment. To place murder and nonconformity to an enlightened idea as equals is ridiculous and contradictory.
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The last sentence should have read: To promote murder while persecuting nonconformists of an enlightened idea is rediculous and contradictory.
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One neglected aspect of birth control, whether in it’s most abominable form of abortion, or in its mildest form of church approved “Natural Law”, is the effect it has on society and the actions of its members.
Young males have during their formative years (16 to 24) only one thing on their mind – how do I get into “her” pants.
The chance of getting pregnant before the young man would - or even could - commit himself with the appropriate resources to raise the potential offspring, kept “her” with her knees tightly closed. Only through a good job, a home, and a marriage agreement that provided for security, a young man had the chance to “get some” on a regular basis.
As a result, the energy of the young males is channeled towards getting an education, a job, and provide for a nest.
Virtually all these incentives have been taken away by our modern “value free” society and the easy availability of “birth control”. The young ladies can give freely without fear of getting pregnant, letting the young men have it all, without having to work for it. And society makes it even easier with government dispensed and paid “birth control” from pills to abortion. And if a young lady has ADD and forgets the pill and then discovers a moral dilemma with abortion, we provide for her offspring through AFDC. Divorce is easy, and disapproving of promiscuity and single motherhood is considered “hateful”.
And we are wondering about the large new underclass of young men that seem uninterested in getting a career other than a criminal one?
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John: good comment, though abortion, racism, and eugenics all stem from the same root,
the despising of people who are not like ourselves, and thus the belief that they can be
used as tools for our purposes.
There was a case much discussed in abolitionist circles before the Civil War, that of the
Edmonson’s sisters, who were bought by someone who sought to make a tidy profit by
selling them to a brothel. Now, this person was a religious man, and he noted that the
sisters were good Christians, reading the Bible,and all that. But he did not let that
get in the way of making a profit. “Business is business”. If a man can call himself
a Christian and sell a Christian woman for prostitution, then in another time, he would
abort babies - once he defined them as not really human - if he could make a profit of it.
The root is the same, and while the fruits may be different, they are all bitter.
Although it would be nice if pro-lifers acknowledged their historical share of blame in
upholding the sexual double standard, and the mistreatment of the unwed mother while
tolearating the unwed father and even envying him his “manliness” (makes you wonder why
the one punished should be the one who actually took responsability for the baby, not
the one who walked away). By the time the gospel of birth control and abortion came about
it was embraced by women who thought that it would free them from pontential mistreatment
and persecution.
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Adriana, just like her “alter ego” Sid earlier, tries to equate abortion with racism. And she “finds” the root in “despising of people who are not like ourselves”. Nothing could be more far fetched than this line of thinking:
While racism is rooted in the natural instinct of rejection of life forms different from oneself, also known as the “Diktat of the DNA”, abortion is the rejection of something that is as identical to oneself as possible (short of cloning).
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While I certainly respect your unwillingness to mitigate the horror of abortion by equating it with a mere manifestation of racism; I would have to disagree with your interpretation of Adriana’s last remark, Werner. I believe Adriana meant to point out that bigotry of any sort can be at least partly to blame for the abortion epidemic. I, for one, have seen the sexual double standard, so often ignored by so-called upstanding “traditional” Christians in action. I attended a university where fornication, if caught, was punished by the offending party(s) being expelled. So, rather than having their academic careers ruined by a moment of indescretion, nice but silly Christian girls (the physical evidence of their crime eventually being undeniable) would consider certain horrendous alternatives. The actions of Pure and Morally Correct individuals (read: pharisees) thus seems to contribute to the creation of a class of people they can all the more despise.
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Theresa, your defense of Adriana’s argumentation fails to address the logical incoherence in Adriana’s argumentation, which I pointed out.
I have no argument with you about the, what you call “bigotry” and what I would call “intolerance” espoused by the “pharisees”. But as I pointed out in my earlier post, there are certain consequences for society in abolishing these “rules”, as harsh and sexist as they may be.
Regarding the inevitability of the results of a “moment of indiscretion” inducing these “silly Christian girls” to consider the horrendous act of killing an innocent life, one would ask, why they don’t consider the alternative of taking a nine month leave of absence from their studies, suffer through this “inconvenience” and give the “result” up for adoption? There is absolutely no reason in the US of today, to consider abortion even as a remote possibility.
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Thanks for your reply, Werner.
I am not so sure that I was defending Adriana’s ARGUEMENTATION, per se - just her underlying “point” (perhaps that’s not technical enough, but oh well -I am at work and I have middle-management threatening to look over my shoulder at any moment here). Her point, as I understood it, is that racism and the abortion epidemic are RELATED, rather than equated. The “root” of the Abortion epidemic resembles the root of racist oppression in that in each case what may be described as an underclass suffers from the displeasure (threat of hostility) from an “overclass” - displeasure, disgust, hostility being the common denominator. The person who is persecuted because of race may self-destructively do things to perpetuate race hatred. The person who has an abortion to maintain appearances of “purity” may do so because she fears being persecuted as a slut. In either case, the sin of the latter is not in question but the attitude of the former that, in some way, contributes or exacerbates that original sin.
Those who hold power in the “silly Christian girl’s” community (in my case, the university administrators) indirectly condone the act for their own love of appearances (not monetary gain, to be sure, but for a very worldly “benefit” nonetheless) - by enforcing policies that would cause such an option to appear more thinkable - to an impressionable kid - than the alternative (keeping the child and being expelled, in thanks for the morally right action, from the university).
I am in no way sympathetic with the fake compassion of the pro-abortion movement and I know full well that the choice between your baby’s life and an academic degree is a false one. My point is simply that before we preach fire and brimstone, we should be careful that the most vulnerable are not alienated by our Purity. This discussion is very interesting for academic elites but I think mine and perhaps Adriana’s concern is rather practical…
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The difference between racism/racialism and abortion is that the former, sometimes, though rarely, leads to the killing of another,
Sometimes! Rarely! It seems that the ignorant know nothing of why 6 million Jews and assort gypsies were killed 1938-1945 and Slavs were enslaved at the same time. But at least Mr. Nucci is correct in principle. Mr. Map has no moral principles at all, and no sound reasoning either, judging from his use of the Tu Quoque fallacy:
During the last LA riots it was noted that blacks singled out and targeted Orientals for violence and theft. Yet no one described this as racist.
Map also doesn’t know that racialism killed a whole bunch of people. Seen from the point of view of Catholic Personalism, abortion and racialism are deeply depersonalizing, and thus equivalent in the sense not only because they lead to mass murder, but also because they are both intrinsic evils. But the Fundamentalist Bible thumper Map doesn’t even know the difference between intrinsic evil and double effect.
Looks like Werner has taken a break from The Turner Diaries to thumb through Der Mythus des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. How ya like ol’ Al’s German, Werner!
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Sid,
Now tell us, what is this diatribe of yours meant to be? That you hate everything German is well known (I am wondering though how that fits with your supposed opposition to racism), but why do you attack me personally? Because of the place of my birth, rather than taking on the arguments I make? If you don’t have anything worthwhile to contribute, don’t post anything at all! And the reference to the “Turner Diaries”? Can you be somewhat clearer and tell me what you mean by that? Is it supposed to be funny?
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RE: Platypus
Sam Francis was very smart and decent man, but that is probably the silliest thing he ever said. What else would a true conservative call Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Himmler, Elijah Mohammed, Meir Kahane, or Margaret Sanger? Just because David Frum misuses the term “patriotic,” we need not deny the existence of actual traitors.
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I don’t know the Francis quote in question nor its context, but (given other things he wrote) he might have meant something along the lines that Cultural Marxists popularized the charge of “racism” to undermine Western Civilization so that each time one uses it he is playing into the hands of the Cultural Marxists.
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Maybe Paul Gottfried, Scott Richert or Tom Piatak could better clarify what he meant....
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John:
Before dismissing Sam Francis’ quote as silly, it would help to define racism. If you apply your condemnation of Sam’s understanding of racism, then you’ll have to define self preservation as hateful egotism, love of your own children as supremacism, and love of the other sex as homophobia. Count me in on all of those.
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I smile, but must admire the dedication of an author, when I read his tract against a “slut” and libertine on the website of a man who’s last column included the following:
“I was thinking of putting up Max Mosley for Pugs, but I shall wait the results of his libel case. But anyone who spends five hours with five hookers has to be a great man, and as Pugs Club allows only great men as members, Max qualifies.”
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@John Zmirak
1) Are you always against birth control, i.e. ‘the pill’? I don’t think you are, but please explain. I’m interested in the pro-life viewpoint, either pro or con.
2) I can understand very well that people are against eugenics and abortion—I oppose eugenics. But I think that abortion should be limited, not forbidden. Teenage girls, rape victims, life-of-the-mother-threatening pregnancies and mothers who are pregnant with badly handicapped children should all have some sort of choice, at least imho.
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I agree with Steven. Anyone who celebrates Taki’s sexual escapades and his outlook
has no business calling anyone else a slut.
This sexual double standard that men can do what they want, but women better watch out
or they will be horribly punished (ever heard of honor killings?) is the best recruiter
for Planned Parenthood. No one wants to take moral guidance from cruel and unjust judges,
which is what upholders of the double standard are.
So, John, either acknowledge your sin of treating unchasate women differently (and
cruelly) than you do unchaste men, or keep a prudent silence.
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RE: Adriana,
Er, I’m confused. If you want to accuse me of inconsistency, cite something I wrote MYSELF, not a piece by another writer on the same site. I take no particular responsibility for the chastity of the publisher of a Web site where I write.... If I wrote for the NY Times, should have feel accountable for Sulzberger’s sins? Would you, Adriana, if you were invited to write for the NY Times?
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John:
If Szulsberg were to make public his transgressions and speak proudly of them, I would
expect you to comment on them. We may keep a prudent silence on private conduct and
pretend we are not aware of it, but once it becomes public, silence means assent.
You have the choice to protest the cavalier attitude towards libertinism in your male
associates, or refrain from complaining about libertinism in women.
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Actually Adriana, I have the choice of discretion as well. The reason to bring up Sanger’s personal morality is that she MADE the personal into the political. It’s not as if I chose some female public figure who campaigned on behalf of, for instance, vegetarianism--and dug up the fact that she had loose morals. No, Sanger was a CRUSADER for “free love.” That was the heart of her mission, what animated everything else--as I try to establish. So her morals are entirely relevant. If Taki were using this site to crusade on behalf of libertine laws and policies, whose ill effects would be backed up by the coercive power of the State (eugenics, sterilization), I certainly wouldn’t write for his site. Please notice how many MALE libertines I mention critically in the article: Havelock Ellis, de Sade, Kinsey. That’s a ratio of 3-1. Please Adriana, put down your nut-cutters, and have a cup of nice herb tea.
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I think it is significant that the criticism originated with the word slut (which appears only in the headline), while the defense has centered on the legitimacy of discussing Sanger’s personal behavior. In my view, and it may be in that of others who appear to be criticizing the substance of your post, the word “slut” was simply not worthy of appearing in the headline of your excellent article.
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I would suggest that maybe John could have used a word such as pig in place of slut. There are in fact many a slut who don’t deserve comparison to Margaret Sanger for the simple fact that they wouldn’t consider murdering an unborn child or the practice of eugenics.
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Tom K,
Would you have preferred “a woman of loose morals”?
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VERY good, John. Planned Parenthood is a mirror into the soul of our dominant classes.
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This link: http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol6no2/DevlinTOQV6N2.pdf may help Adrianna to better understand the biological underpinnings of the so called “double standard” and Western society’s recent attempt to banish it. Although it is not a soothing bedtime story, it does point the way toward plausible explanations for both the alleged double standard and the real life frustrations afflicting both sexes.
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cipher:
The “double standard” is, whatever its biological underpinnings, a destabilizing
force. Why? Because a woman cannot be unchaste unless a man also is, and it makes
for bad law to punish only one perpetrator and to leave the other one to go and
reoffend againn.
Because the punished party is the one who takes responsibility for the baby, while
the unpunished can walk away. Abandoning babies *should* never be encouraged, and this
is what the double standard does.
Because it promotes prostitution. If men can have sex anytime, but women are constrained,
then there will be a class of women given to satisfy horny men. Encouraging prostitution
is not sound public policy.
Because it makes men bad neighbors. Basically we have the model of a man who will keep others from
having relations with his sister,but thinks nothing of seducing the sisters of others. This man
is as much a bad neighbor as someone who never lends any of his goods, but makes free with his
neighbors’s possessions. Such men are not the stuff with which democracy can be built.
As for biology - our biological imperative is to urinate and defecate wherever the urge hits us.
Civilization means that we only do in properly designated areas. Would you like us to remove those
artificial constraints against our biological natures?
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PB: Yes, I would have preferred that. Or “easy virtue”. Or, “sexually promiscuous”. Something emphasizing the descriptive over the abusive—though the two are inextricably linked in these areas, the less charged phrases seem more consistent, to me, with the thoughful tone of the piece. Even if “slut” were the right word for the article (which I don’t believe, but is arguable), it would still be the wrong word for the headline, since a headline should convey the sense of its article, and the sense conveyed by that headline, to me at least, is of an article written in a different style.
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Dear Tom,
I disagree. The function of a headline is to make it as hard as possible NOT to read the article. Sorry, but I grew up reading tabloids like the NY Post, and those headlines get readers. Anyway, I don’t think it’s juvenile to call a slut a slut, unless you mean in the sense that it took a child to note that the emperor had no clothes.
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Adriana,
Do you honestly find the double standard or sanctions you mention still in existence among those under the age of, say, 40 or 50 in (American) society today? I see little if any evidence. There seem to be but two rules in operation regarding relations between the sexes: 1) Anything should and does go so long as each party is upfront about his or her aims, desires, expectations, and motivations prior to copulation. 2) The only real “sin” is the concealing one’s aims, desires, expectations or motivations until after the act or acts of copulation have taken place. Therefore the only “acceptable” criterion available for weighing or measuring (judging) the context, value, outcome, and obligations inherent to the copulatory exchange is the verity - not the behavior or character or motive - of the other party. Notions of mate selection, marriage, and family are totally subordinate to the demand for gratification now coupled with a happy outcome. In other words, the spiritual and the social is stripped away so that only the ego remains. More meaningful intercourse manifests while selling a house or getting a haircut. We’ve inherited a sexual whirlwind thanks in large part to famously feral people like Margret Sanger, Kinsey, Brown, and Hefner. A return to your double standard and the sanctions that went with it might come as welcome relief to many.
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I’m opposed to the opinion of the author and many posters here about their opposition to eugenics. Clearly, some people are genetically better suited to be parents than others. Intelligence and temperament are heritable. Criminality, psychosis, and a host of non-mental afflictions have high genetic components. The presence of people who score poorly on such indexes of heritable traits is a threat and a burden to others in society.
At some level, I think we all know that we would prefer to be around people on the high end of these indexes. But what to do about it? Is it wrong to recognize that some people are intelligent, creative, law-abiding, mentally stable, and healthy, that some are at the opposite extreme, and that many are somewhere in between? Is it wrong (in the moral sense) to prefer that the first group have more babies than the second group? Is it wrong to attempt to cause this to happen – by rewarding the first group for procreating and/or by creating obstacles for the second group?
So much intellectual laziness attends this issue. Argumentum ad Nazium: The Nazis favored eugenics. Therefore, eugenics is wrong.
One reason that the issue is not forthrightly addressed is that the genetic decline happens slowly, over generations. Another is that the problem can, to some extent, be masked by advances in science and industrial productivity. Eventually, the situation will catch up with the neglect, but likely this will be long after those who have been responsible for the neglect have died. Or so they secretly hope.
So the religious look to a Better Home Awaiting, and the secular look to the praise of their peers for embracing egalitarianism. On issues like this the distinction between Left and Right, liberal and conservative, secular and religious breaks down. In a way, both Left and Right are being selfish. That is, they are more concerned about scoring points for the afterlife, or impressing their egalitarian friends, than they are about what kind of word they are leaving behind. They believe that humanity is every living person. They are wrong. Humanity includes those yet to be conceived and born. We imperil future generations with the fruits of laziness, cowardice, and fallacy-ridden moral indignation.
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I am wondering though how that fits with your supposed opposition to racism
Lol, what a wacko that guy is. He rants about x and y being “depersonalizing” in one breath, then craps on “ze Germans” in the next, without a hint of irony!
I prefer folks like Cundiff as opponents; may they never be persuaded!
Oh, btw, male and female sexual propriety are apples and oranges because what they protect (male and female fertility) are of vastly different worth. Duh.
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It’s just occurred to me as odd that the abortion “debate"* seems to hinge almost totally on religion or lack thereof. That’s very odd to me. I mean, does one really have to crack a Levantine book to believe murdering unborn children is major bad mojo?
*:there is no debate, just anti-abortionists kicking the snot out of abortionists; I’m actually an abortionist but I recognize that the arguments are ALL on the anti-abortionist’s side.
Btw, I can’t recall if Sanger was a Jew or not but she definitely buries the needle on the ole Jewdar, and her politics seem much more consistent with Jewish tribalism than any “liberalism.”
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No, Svigor, put that particular anxiety to rest. Sanger was an apostate Catholic, of Irish origin. Hence she was fully cognizant of what (and Who) she attacked. God help her.
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Adriana,
I do not understand why you must make strawmen of the double standard issue by merely focussing on the minutiae of penal laws. How about analysing the legitimacy of the prejudice itself ? First, one would have to discern the origin, which in this case is ontology and teleology. Women have a different nature than men and thus different vocations. Women are naturally passive, whereas men are naturally aggressive. Original sin exaggerates or mixes these ontological ideals, but the body and soul of a woman is one of passivity, as opposed to the body and soul of men being one of natural aggression.
It was chivalry, what one could call an expansion on the themes of Our Lord and His Blessed Mother, that refined man and woman into their proper Christian places. Man’s rougher pagan edges were filed down into generosity, modesty, charity, justice, and his aggressive energies were all funneled into productive and morally redemptive pursuits of paternity and authority. Women, conversely, were boats brought up with the rising tide of Mary; the more her virtues were glorified, the better was woman’s state. These include humility, obedience, and the other feminine virtues we know today, that a woman might fulfill her three possible vocations in life—wife and mother, religious, consecrated virgin—to perfection, being the handmaid of the patriarchal authority, not holding it herself, but being in perfect and complementary agreement with it, apotheosised in the analogy Holy Mother Church to Our Lord.
As such, it is doubly disordered for a woman, of such a beautifully delicate and gentle nature, meant to be passive and created for man, to adopt a disposition foreign to herself in order to satiate her unnatural lusts. Such a woman is twice as imbalanced as a man, and her natural strengths and weaknesses are inverted, rather than undisciplined. Hence why the double standard is rooted in reality.
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Svigor, try to post a comment that doesn’t mention the Jews. Try hard. I know you can do it.
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So Sangor was a Catholic, who went off the rails.Well it’s too bad, we can’t blame the Protestants or Jews. Actully she put the Jews with the blacks as weeds in the garden, that had to be pulled. She and Hitler sure had enough in common.
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Who says the Protestants and Jews cannot be blamed ? It was their ideas that made an impression on these poor souls and caused them to apostasise.
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