@blatham,
blatham wrote:
Re Margaret Sanger
I trust we can all acknowledge that Sanger's position/thoughts on eugenics is of no relevance whatsoever in right wing criticism of her. If this was a serious issue for right wing Americans, they would have similar campaigns against Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (along with many others). It is all about abortion.
The eugenics point is a classic example of an ad hominem where a logically irrelevant fact is utilized to discredit a speaker's position. "He's gay therefore bound to be grossly irresponsible. Don't believe a word he says".
Nonsense !
This is what we used to call gorilla dust - stuff thrown up to distract attention from an uncomfortable point. What "ad hominem"? where? In fact there is none, classic or otherwise.
Your remarks in contrast do indeed include a starkly obvious ad hominem in terms of your critical portrayal of all who are opposed to abortions, and your fallacious implication that this was necessarily the sole motivation behind the discussion. Abortion and eugenics are indeed related as means of attaining desired ends. However Hightower's point and my rebuttal were solely about eugenics.
I was responding to Hightors's claim that there was no element of racism in Sanger's views. I pointed out that Sanger made very explicit references to racial distinctions in the eugenics argument she was making -- and which he posted in a failed effort to support his fallacious argument.
I made no reference whatever to abortion, though it is true there is an obvious eugenic factor involved in abortion and, as well, a eugenic element in our abortion statistics, which involve far more than a proportional share of Black babies destroyed by it.
Teddy Roosevelt was, among other things a strong advocate of what Kipling called "the white man's burden" - a very popular and widespread illusion in that colonial age - particularly in Britain and its principal colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zeeland, and, as well among the British colonial administrators of India, Burma, and Malaya. Had he lived today I suspect he would have gotten over it.
Many of those opposed to Abortion are also opposed to such eugenics, just as many who support it, appear to, like Margaret Sanger, support some forms of eugenics.
