ObamaGenics wouldn’t be a blue jeans clothing line featuring
Mrs. Obama but a bold, new progressive initiative and a descendent of the 20th
Century American eugenics movement – the subject of Edwin Black’s book “War Against The
Weak.”
Eugenics was, according to Paul A. Lombardo, author of “Three
Generations of Imbeciles,” “entirely consistent with the even
larger social movement that was key underpinning of eugenic activities:
Progressivism.” (p. 17)
The eugenics movement marshaled support from agencies in 32 states
where laws passed concerning the “socially inadequate.” The goal: Purge society
of the “unfit.” The tool: Forced sterilizations that numbered about 60,000
between the adoption of the first state eugenics law (Indiana, 1907) and the
repeal of the last law (N. Carolina, 2003).
California alone tallied 20,000 sterilizations between 1909 and
1979. But the California count hasn’t stopped. In July 2013, The Center for
Investigative Reporting’s website
revealed that “Doctors under contract with the California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006
to 2010 without required state approvals.”
The sterilized
included the “feebleminded, paupers, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the
congenitally weak, people predisposed to specific diseases, the deformed, the
blind and the deaf.” (Black, p. 43)
Eugenics
officials gathered endorsements and financial support from many early 20th
Century celebrity-status persons and foundations, including Alexander Graham
Bell, Junior League founder Mary W, Harriman
Rumsey (William Averell
Harriman’s sister, and daughter of railroad magnate E.H. Harriman), Andrew
Carnegie and the Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation,
New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret
Sanger, economist Irving Fisher, and former President Theodore Roosevelt who,
in 1913, wrote to a leading eugenicist that, “…society has no business to
permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…Some day, we will realize that the
prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type, is to
leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to
permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” (Black, p.99)
The linkage
between the eugenics movement and progressivism is unavoidable, but unmentionable
today among those who, like Hillary Clinton in a 2008 presidential debate, defined herself as
a “proud, modern, American progressive.”
Fortunately
for today’s “unfit,” the Holmes-Holdren Reproductive Services Act (HHRSA), or
ObamaGenics, would not be a rehash of the old eugenics. Instead, it
would represent an enlightened morphing of the old eugenics into the modern
genetic science represented by the Human Genome
Project. The juxtaposition of old eugenics and the New Genetics – ObamaGenics
– would be reflected in the legislation’s name.
First,
the “Holmes” in the Act refers to the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr. He wrote the May 2, 1927 majority opinion of the Court in
the landmark case Buck v. Bell (Superintendent of Virginia State
Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded).
“Buck”
was Carrie Buck – deemed to be a second generation imbecile, housed at a
Virginia state facility for the unfit where she awaited sterilization. Carrie
had an infant daughter named Vivian – the alleged third generation imbecile
from the same polluted gene pool. Carrie was scheduled to be sterilized. Her
case was used to test the legality of the Virginia state law that authorized
the procedure.
Oliver
Wendell Holmes was the darling jurist of the early 20th Century
American progressives. As Lombardo wrote, “After nearly twenty-five years on
the Supreme Court, Holmes was the most celebrated judge in America. In March
1926, his portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine as a tribute
to his eighty-fifth birthday. The New Republic regaled him as a ‘tender,
wise, beautiful being’ who ‘redeems the whole legal profession’ and, a few
months later, applauded him as the wise ‘Yankee, strayed from Olympus.’” (p.
163)
Former
President, and then Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, William Howard Taft assigned
Holmes to write the majority opinion. Holmes’ opinion
included this paragraph:
“We
have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best
citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those
who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often
not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped
with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to
execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their
imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing
their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough
to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
After
a perfunctory appeal where Carrie’s lawyer argued against his client’s case,
Carrie was sterilized on October 19, 1927. (This was six years before
Germany’s Nazi regime passed the “Law for the
Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.”)
Later,
Holmes reportedly
told a friend, “One decision that I wrote gave me pleasure, establishing the
constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of imbeciles.”
Carrie’s
daughter, Vivian, lived with foster parents until she died shortly after her eighth birthday of
an intestinal disease. By all indications, Vivian was a normal child who
manifested no indications of imbecility.
“Holdren,”
the second name in The Holmes-Holdren Reproductive Services Act refers to
Dr. John P.
Holdren,
Assistant
to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President's
Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
In
1977, he co-authored “Ecoscience” with
two other writers. The book is available on-line here. The following
excerpts from “Ecoscience” are dual-referenced by both the paper-published pages/the
on-line version pages. Holdren’s thinking represents the intellectual avant-garde
thinking behind ObamaGenics.
“[U]nder the
United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be
enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide
for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very
broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws,
even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the
existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to
endanger the society (pp. 837-838/1280-1281)
“One way to
carry out disapproval [of illegitimate childbearing] might be to insist that
all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption -- especially those born to
minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If
a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through
adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it...It
would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have
abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on
the society. (786/1200-1201)
A program of
sterilizing women after their second or third child…might be easier to
implement than trying to sterilize men…The development of a long-term
sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when
pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility
control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with
official permission, for a limited number of births…Adding a sterilant to
drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more
than most proposals for involuntary fertility control.” (pp. 787-788/1202-1203)
“Individual
rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction.
Some people…have viewed the right to have children as a fundamental and
inalienable right. Yet neither the Declaration of Independence nor the
Constitution mentions a right to reproduce…Where the society has a "compelling,
subordinating interest" in regulating population size, the right of the
individual may be curtailed.” (pp. 838/1281)
So, what could we expect from ObamaGenics? Here’s a
preview of five of its many possible features.
1. Compliance with the National Marriage Act (NMA) of
2015, outlined earlier at the American Thinker
website, would
require couples intending to have children to first submit the results of their
personal genetic profile (PGP) to the government before being granted a federal
parenting license (FPL).
2. To make ObamaCare even more of a cost-savings program
than it already promises to be, those with certain negative genetic markers
would not be granted a FPL. This will preclude healthcare costs arising from births
from bad gene coupling (BGC).
3. The new Genetic Record
Office (GRO), part of Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS),
would, following the example of
Iceland as reported by TIME magazine, “mine the gene pool of an entire
country in search of root causes – and potential cures for – some of the
world’s worst diseases.” As recently reported by some news outlets, DNA samples are
already being spot-collected at police checkpoints.
4. A DHHS grant would fund the assignment of at least one
Reproductive Services Counselor, trained by Planned Parenthood (PP), in
every Independent School District in the nation. The larger districts would
have proportionately more counselors. The reproductive services professionals
would educate students on the availability of on-demand, no-cost abortions and,
in cases where students have a record of previous pregnancies, counsel boys and
girls to undergo painless sterilization procedures. The DHHS would incentivize
voluntary sterilization by offering Wal-Mart and McDonald’s gift cards to
participants in the program.
The role of PP is consistent with the organization’s founder,
Margaret Sanger, who, on October 25, 1950, spoke at
the annual meeting lunch of the Planned Parenthood Foundation election of America
meeting at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York, and advocated “…decreasing the
progeny of those human beings affiliated with transmissible diseases and
dysgenic qualities of body and mind. While our present Federal Governmental
Santa Clauses have their hands in the taxpayer's pockets, why not in their
generous giving mood be constructive and provide for sterilizing as well as
giving a pension, dole -- call it what you may -- to the feeble-minded and the
victims of transmissible, congenital diseases? Such a program would be a sound
future investment as well as a kindness to the couples themselves by preventing
the birth of dozens of their progeny to become burdens, even criminals of
another generation. It would save innocent children from the cruelty of being
born to such parents.”
5. Youth, of both sexes, in juvenile detention facilities would
be offered significant reductions in their sentences by voluntarily submitting
to sterilization.
All this, and more, is needed. Citizen reproduction in America is
too complex and too important to leave to the limited decision-making
capabilities of individual citizens. As Obama Science Advisor John Holdren
stated, “Individual
rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction.”
As individuals, we can’t know what’s best for the nation. It takes
a big government staffed by big-brained experts to tell us what to do.
Lee Cary blogs at TeaParty911.com and other publications.
1 comment:
“Individual rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction.”
Holdren would get his way if for a second this regime thought they could get away with it, but they cannot and it is too late. Should such a proposal be seriously floated, the resulting uproar would propel even more Dems out of office at the midterms.
But the fact that such people are even getting close to proposing this should send shivers down the spine of citizens. Given the trajectory of this regime and of government in general, we have reach the point where the risks of calling a Convention to consider amendments to the Constitution carries less overall risks than allowing current trends to continue.
Several people like Mark Levin and Randy Barnett have put forth ideas and suggestions about how to repair and redefine the relationship between the people, the states and the federal government. We must correct these flaws while there is still time to do so.
And remember that the surviving states will have to ratify any proposals with a super-majority. A side benefit will be that the instant that calling such a Convention has credibility the left will attempt to preserve the power they have, meaning we could see substantial moderation.
On my part I see that when government has the power to create all the money it needs without asking the taxpayers for permission, it can buy all the voters it needs to continue its expansion. We must severely curtail the ability of government to create money or debt so we limit the level of spending. We are being made debt serfs and that is a form of indentured servitude.
Infinite money enables infinite government.
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