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Entry: Margaret Sanger and the Eugenics Meme Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/margaret_sanger_and_the_eugenics_meme#24543 Post contents: I'm tempted to suggest that Mr. Purcell's remarks above must be in jest, since so many are so obviously incorrect. <i>Sanger was a eugenicist, but so was everybody else.</i> As Mr. Piatak has pointed out, that is certainly not true, and even Marcus has simply claimed that Sanger was an eugenicist, "Like many people of her time." (I'd only add that even "many" makes sense only if we're talking primarily about Eastern "opinion leaders" of a WASP extraction.) <i>the main motivation for her contraceptive zeal was not eugenics, but sexual liberation.</i> Unless I'm missing something (and perhaps I am), Peter Ramus doesn't seem to be suggesting that the passage he quoted from Sanger reveals what Mr. Purcell claims it does. (Ramus, in fact, calls it a "random quote," not a "central" one, or an "exemplar," or somesuch.) Anyone who understands anything about early 20th-century progressivism (as Mr. Purcell certainly does) knows that "many" people (though certainly not "everybody") believed in both sexual liberation and eugenics. Reading Sanger, there is no particular reason to place sexual liberation as more important in her thought than eugenics. And Planned Parenthood, while she was still alive, focused its efforts primarily on poor, immigrant, Catholic women and blacks--not the middle-class and wealthy women who might have "benefitted" from "sexual liberation." <i>Needless to say the provoke the usual tiresome “Paleos are n*ggerloving tools of the J*ws” spam.</i> Since Mr. Ramus was the only commenter before Mr. Purcell to use any form of the word "paleo," it seems reasonable to assume that Mr. Purcell's remark is aimed at Mr. Ramus. Now, Mr. Ramus and I have tangled on more than one occasion, and it's certainly true that Mr. Ramus is no fan of mine (or, for that matter, of my religion), but I think that it's clear that he's being unfairly judged here. Mr. Ramus criticized Marcus, not for being one of those "n*ggerloving tools of the J*ws," but for <i>defending Planned Parenthood</i>, an organization founded on eugenicist principles. That may not have been Marcus's intention, but as I pointed out in my comment above, this article really doesn't make any sense unless Marcus thinks that the mission of Planned Parenthood, then and now, is laudable. Hence, Mr. Ramus's comment is perfectly reasonable and cannot reasonably be interpreted as racist. Sent at: 2008 10 12