While Skye, Scott and Word are doing a great job on blogging about the Spector CYA move I figured I would move onto a story not widely reported due to all the other news. That story would be Hillary Clinton comparing Margaret Sanger to Thomas Jefferson. No, not a apple to apple type comparison, but more of a I respect Sanger the same as I respect Jefferson….they both had flaws.
First…some background.
On March 27th of this year Hillary Clinton accepted a Planned Parenthood award called the Margaret Sanger Award. So named because Sanger is the founder of the group, originally called the American Birth Control League. She had this to say about it’s founder:
Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision … And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.
Now….for those who know Sanger’s history, the statement above should shock you. As it did to Nebraska congressman Jeff Fortenberry who said the following during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on April 22nd:
Your remarks last month, when you called Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, a person whom you enormously admire, were stunning to me. Margaret Sanger clearly embraced bigotry and racism. She advocated for the elimination of the disabled, the downtrodden and the black child. In one of her writings, she said, “Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.” I don’t believe these ideologies have a place in our pluralistic society. And you went on to say that you will use American foreign policy in your position to further reproductive rights, which includes abortion, across the globe.
Madame Secretary, I don’t believe we should use American foreign policy to export abortion. This will undermine, in my view, our foreign relations in many areas throughout the world, including Latin America and Africa and among Muslim peoples. Promoting the international abortion industry is an imposition of our own woundedness upon others. Abortion has caused tremendous grief in this society, and its export I believe will be seen as a form of neocolonialism that is paternalistic and elitist and an assault on the dignity especially of the poor and vulnerable. I believe women deserve better, women throughout the world deserve better.
Her answer:
Well, Congressman, let me say with respect to your comments about Margaret Sanger, you know, I admire Thomas Jefferson. I admire his words and his leadership and I deplore his unrepentant slaveholding. I admire Margaret Sanger being a pioneer in trying to empower women to have some control over their bodies and I deplore statements that you have referenced. That is the way we often are when we look at flawed human beings. There are things that we admire and things we deplore.
But Thomas Jefferson didn’t make it his life’s work to promote slavery and actually opposed slavery:
As for Jefferson, he opposed slavery–as both John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln argued in their own times. The primary principle that animated his political thought, his vision, is the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal.” The fact that he continued to own slaves until his death in 1826 is in many ways a contradiction of his political vision. It can be attributed partly to the selfishness described by Jefferson himself in his Notes on the State of Virginia, that “no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him.” It can also be partly attributed to Jefferson’s prudential judgment that a gradual emancipation combined with colonization would be preferable to the immediate emancipation of millions of free blacks into a virulently racist society.
Margaret Sanger on the other hand DID make it her life’s work to promote eugenics. The VISION that promoted the weeding out of the “undesirables” in the human race. Hitler used the eugenics theory to justify his master race theory and ultimately ended with the Holocaust
Some quotes from the “great” Sanger:
“…human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning… human beings who never should have been born.” [speaking about the poor and immigrants]
Pivot of Civilization
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population…” Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble – Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College: Massachusetts.
“The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.
“Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child,”
Birth Control Review, April 1932
“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need … We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”
Margaret Sanger, April 1933 Birth Control Review
“Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.
“The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5.
More here.
Which brings me to this great interview of Angela Franks, author of Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility
Margaret Sanger is the model from which progressives are molded from….and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are prime examples of a progressive.
And after today they are now in complete control of this country with the super majority they have long desired.
See author page