On 7/24/2012 3:49 PM, Crmccann wrote:
> She is not happy to have religious allies, rather she suffers them.

Perhaps.  The point is, your claim that logically she could not hold
certain views is refuted by the quotes that shows she did hold them.
You are using too much deduction and not enough close reading.



> Finally, I am sincerely hope this will be final, there is this from Birth Control Review, April 1932, pp.107-108:

Well it cannot be final since you again quote out of context in a way that is likely to be misleading.



> "The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics."

By quoting this out of context you leave the reader unaware that she is talking
about immigation policy.



> "The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes,
> dope-fiends, classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as
> necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct."

Here yes, she *is* trying to be humanitarian.  I am baffled why you cannot see that.
Such views may offend us in the 21st century, but they were common enough a century ago.
(And in truth they are close to principles that govern policy even now.)
What is unusual is that she want this "segregation" to be on farms and open spaces,
and that the goal is improvement (i.e, what we might call rehabilitation).

Compare that to what the 20th century actually
brought us for dope fiends, criminals, and prostitutes. In this country we imprison
more than 2 million people (stock, not flow) out of a population of 311 million.
And these prisons are not "farms and open spaces" for moral improvement.  They
are breeding grounds for criminality and recidivism, at enormous social cost. So
fond are we of such arrangements that we have states (LA prominently) where law
enforcement officials own private jails that are profitable only if they keep
locking up enough people, which (oddly enough) leads to sky-high incarceration rates.
So we can go further and say that those incarcerated by the criminal justice system
that did emerge would almost certainly have fared better under her vision.

Obviously by our standards her discussion of "illiterates, paupers, unemployables"
appears ignorant, distasteful, and misguided. But again, and I would expect this
to be obvious, the question is not whether she was making humanitarian proposals by your
standard or my standard, but by her standard and the standards of the time.
It is clear that by her standards she is making humanitarian proposals.
We could discuss whether she was out of sync with the standards of the time in this area.
As she put it in text that you fail to quote, she is looking for policy made
"on a basis of health instead of punishment".


> What a humanitarian!  Upholding individual rights and liberties from the intrusion of the all-knowing, all-powerful State!

As I have shown you repeatedly by quotation, she clearly expresses concern about
rights and liberties. She *also* stood dismayingly ready to "segregate" very large
numbers of "defective" people.  So she was clearly an elitist in this sense: she
cared about the rights and liberties of intelligent and productive citizens but not
as much about those of "morons" or "criminals". You have yet to explain why you find this
an odd  combination, particularly at the time.  To put this in context, even now at the
beginning of the 21st century, few in the US appear to be very bothered that we incarcerate
millions in conditions that Sanger would have opposed on humanitarian grounds.
I suppose we can each test our own attitudes toward this by examining how actively
we are working to end it.

Alan Isaac