The expansion of the GOP’s “Big Tent” to include ideas that social convervatives find distasteful is inevitable in today’s political climate. But I never would have suspected that Republican politicians would feel comfortable enough to champion themes and techniques that are associated with eugenics.
For example, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer thinks that giving poor people food will cause them to breed like rabbits:
My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. “You know why? Because they breed. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.
Although he says he could have chosen his words more carefully when he compared people who take public assistance to stray animals, Bauer refused to apologize for the remark. But at least Bauer only wants to keep the poor from breeding. Bill Binnie, a Republican Senate candidate in New Hampshire, is willing to take a more direct approach by euthanizing the Lebensunwerten Lebens:
“We had a child. We had a pregnancy, my wife and I. I don’t tell this story publicly as a rule. I’ll tell it now. It’s a small group. I’m pro-choice because we had a positive amniocentesis test. We were going to have a special needs child,” said Binnie when asked by an audience member about social issues. “One of the things that happens when you realize you’re going to have a special needs child is they sit you down and you learn [how] it impacts the other children in your family,” Binnie continued. “Who’s going to take care of that child?” “Now in my wife’s case, in my case, we could afford it and I though about it and we had that child,” he concluded. “It made me come to that other intersection of what matters. I’m pro-choice.” Binnie also explains in the video that the test result was a false positive and that his child was born “healthy.”
Binnie’s admission shouldn’t be all that shocking when you consider that ninety-two percent of women choose to terminate a pregnancy following prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome. Yet is is still disconcerting to hear Republican politicians in the twenty-first century openly embrace and promote the cultural acceptance of eugenics.
January 25th, 2010 | 4:47 pm
The most common criticism of libertarianism that I get all the time is that it requires a society composed of rationally self-sufficient individuals and that present-day society is anything but. Perhaps these politicians are beginning to recognize and act on this fact.
January 25th, 2010 | 5:02 pm
1. Any one of his family members could develop special needs in the next half hour.
2. There are many kinds of special needs–one being that for a moral compass instead of a weather vane.
January 25th, 2010 | 6:03 pm
Joe,
I don’t know why you are surprised. Both parties consist largely of alliances of convenience between different, often shifting, interests. I don’t believe that either party operates on the basis of any consistent, well-developed moral or ethical philosophy that would preclude consideration of eugenicist ideas. Prior to Reagan and the rise of social conservatives within the party, some of the strongest advocates of “population control” were party leaders such as the Rockefellers and the Bushes (H.W. & Barbara). During the Reagan presidency, Republicans called for cutting or eliminating benefit programs on basis of ideas very similar to those expressed by Bauer. The stereotype of the “welfare queen” and books such as The Bell Curve reinforced these ideas. This in turn led to proposals such as requiring welfare recipients to have Norplant implants or to limit the number of a AFDC recipients children who could receive benefits. The Democrats are just more subtle. For example, in a bill that included an increase in public funding for contraceptive services to low-income people, one of the justifications which it provided for the increased expenditure was that it would save the government money by resulting in the birth of fewer children who would qualify for Medicaid or other services. In my view, the pro-choice movement co-opted the Democratic Party and then the Republican Party co-opted the pro-life movement. But these were political moves; in neither case were they based on any kind of inherent world view regarding the intrinsic worth, or lack thereof, of the human person.
January 25th, 2010 | 7:15 pm
Been there; done that. When our test came back positive, the doctor told us it was all but certain the child would be born with “special needs.” He told us to go home and think about “termination” (his word). We thought about it, and decided only God has the right to decide who lives and who dies, so we would have to take what we got. Ours too was a false positive. My daughter is brillient, regularly scoring in the mid to high 90′s on standardized tests of intelligence.
I wonder how many “false positives” have been killed over the years, not that it matters ultimately, because the “true positives” have just as great a claim on the right to life.
January 25th, 2010 | 8:29 pm
Utilitarianism is the most common moral compass for American public policy, and has been since the Founding (a rousing reprise of “Molasses, Rum and Slaves,” anyone?)
Eugenics and choice are more naturally at home in the GOP than the Democratic party over the long term, and I expect it will be Democratic pro-lifers who will do more to reflect shifting attitudes on abortion. We’re far from there yet. But that’s where I expect the heaves of the ground to lead to over time.
January 26th, 2010 | 3:45 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by First Things, Contemplari, Rebecca Taylor, DNC DUDES, P G and others. P G said: social policy =/= personal choice http://tiny.cc/AENUA [...]
January 26th, 2010 | 4:23 am
How many hospitals provide genetic counseling whenever a pre-natal test comes back with a negative result? The medical establishment, in so doing, seeds a lot of unnecessary fears in parents, and boosts the rate of abortion. Pro-lifers should take a closer look at this practice.
January 26th, 2010 | 7:06 am
You are not very intelligent. Abortion is evil, a crime against God and man. What, however, is its relation to the perfectly moral notion that we don’t want a society filled with low IQ types, or worse, criminal sociopaths, both conditions (stupidity and criminal propensity) having a high hereditarian component (as well as correlated with poverty)?
Of course we should not feed the poor; it does indeed only encourage them to breed. It is also grotesquely immoral, as well as imprudent. I would like to have an additional child myself, but I can’t afford any more private school tuition, and public schools in LA are unthinkable (and very physically dangerous) for white children. Thus, by stealing money from me to support all manner of payments to the poor, you are in effect enacting a policy of DYSGENICS: I am prevented from having more (superior) children because I have pay for the (re)production of more poor (and non-white) children. How stupid is such a policy?! Call it by its real name: “national suicide”.
The poor have moral obligations to society, especially when being fed by society. The first one is NOT to reproduce their genetically inferior genomes. You are going to be hearing a lot more of these types of arguments as the West deepens its death spiral (which is primarily racial and dysgenic, not due to the retreat of Christianity from the public square.
Christians need to face the empirical world squarely, and adjusttheir thinking accordingly.
January 26th, 2010 | 7:10 am
And remember Paul (I forget the verse #):
“He that doth not work, neither shall he eat.”
Thus spake the true Christian – not the sentimental neo-Marxist is priest’s garb.
January 26th, 2010 | 8:50 am
Liam is onto something above. The discussion on torture showed that utilitarianism is the guiding moral principle that many conservatives, including christian conservatives, apply to foreign policy. Why should we be surprised that some conservatives also apply utilitarian priciples to other other issues.
That’s not to let liberals of the hook. There’s plenty of utilitarianism on that side too.
January 26th, 2010 | 9:57 am
This is less about eugenics than it is in maximally expanding the private realm as dictated by a libertarian political philosophy. If, as libertarians urge, I have only those duties that I freely choose to bear, I have none to the poor unless helping them is a hobby of mine. If I am forced to help them anyways, of course they will looked to me as burden better eliminated. Nor do I have any duties to unborn children I did not wish for, particularly those whose birth would weigh me down with burdens I can’t accept.
Libertarianism is in vogue right now, and the GOP is happy to sing that song so long as it helps them to beat up on Obama and regain power. No one should be surprised to hear Republicans sounding like Ayn Rand these days.
January 26th, 2010 | 10:09 am
Good one Leon! That’s the motto of old-school Bolsheviks, not sentimental neo-marxists.
January 26th, 2010 | 10:16 am
Nickp,
Indeed, and I didn’t not mean to imply there is not.
January 26th, 2010 | 10:31 am
We don’t seem to have come very far from the eugenics movement of the early 20th century when Margaret Sanger and her buddies were all about the problem of the undesireable among us.Adolph borrowed some of his best ideas from them. From these apparently rational ideas for dealing with the dregs of society will come further ideas that will drag us down the rat hole of elitist hubris. I would start from the point that states in no uncertain terms that eugenics and all of its cousins are unacceptable and hardly the best and only way of responding to the poor and enfeebled among us. It is the inclination to take the easy way out that stifles our imaginations and prevents us from seeing the better way. Help can come in many forms some of which even have a republican hue to them; the idea of responsibility, the end of a sugar daddy government that does in fact engender dependent behavior, from our founding fathers some of whom spoke of the need for a virtuous citizenry as a necessary condition for a functioning and free people and from Christianity and others who spoke of our responsibilities to those in need. Sometimes this might entail passing out food and other essentials but most times it meant passing on practical and moral wisdom which has been made more difficult to do by a debased culture and an overreaching and intrusive government.Even if all of the above was done the poor, as Jesus said, will always be with us. Unless my reading of the best of our history is wrong I don’t recall any of our founders suggesting that the answer to the problem of poverty was to eliminate the poor.
January 26th, 2010 | 4:08 pm
Perhaps I need to check the batteries in my “Sarcasm-O-Meter”……Your comment is satire (or ‘parody’ or ‘tongue in cheek’ or whatever the correct term is for “I’m putting you on here…”), right?
January 26th, 2010 | 6:00 pm
My above comment was directed at Leon Haller. That first comment was a ruse, right?
January 27th, 2010 | 5:55 am
Nickp: You lost me. I quoted Paul correctly. I just cannot remember the verse reference.
GeronimoR: Why would you think my comment a ruse? I am perfectly serious. Christianity, though universalist in the sense of being applicable or available to all, is not a religion of national suicide. Far too many religious “conservatives” have drunk far too deeply at the well of secular (liberal, Marxist) egalitarianism.
Moreover, we are in no sense, from the simple premise of Good Samaritanism, required to tolerate increases in the number of poor. The collective community should be striving to eliminate poverty, not subsidize it. You people sound like a bunch of leftists, unlike earlier generations of Christians, who strictly delimited the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor. It is the latter who are not incapable of working for their sustenance, but rather, who are behaviorally deficient (and thus poor). There are legitimately poor people, even in the US, and they need community succor – but that aid should come from PRIVATE sources (including Churches), never the government (which would be socialist and thus unchristian). The duty of the Christian to aid the poor applies ONLY to the deserving (non-culpable) poor, not to lazy parasites – as St. Paul recognized.
January 27th, 2010 | 9:53 am
Leon,
It’s II Thessalonians 3:10, and apparently, it was a favorite of Vladimir Lenin. According to Wikipedia, it also appears in the 1936 Soviet Constitution, a.k.a. the “Stalin” constitution.
Hence, my comment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_shall_he_eat
January 27th, 2010 | 10:07 am
Leon Haller,
I took your comments seriously until you started talking about the superior white man. Then I assumed you were being satirical. Now, it seems you were serious, or you are playing a very elaborate practical joke on the FT website, a website which allows anyone to post any darn thing.
January 27th, 2010 | 12:08 pm
Mr. Haller:
I’m right there with Paul. It was these lines
“Of course we should not feed the poor; it does indeed only encourage them to breed.”
followed by
“I am prevented from having more (superior) children because I have pay for the (re)production of more poor (and non-white) children.”
that struck me as ones that no serious, thoughtful person could write. However, you have now informed me that you are “perfectly serious”. If so, then you are also perfectly nuts.
January 29th, 2010 | 2:07 am
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