He Went There: Mark Oxner Runs Ad Against Alan Grayson, Tying Him To... Margaret Sanger and Eugenics

I know this is a much-promoted idea on the right. Mark Oxner is taking it up -- and running a Spanish-language ad in the heavily (44%, I think) Hispanic new district, noting "progressive" Margaret Sanger's support for abortions to prevent the birth of "wrong" people.

Margaret Sanger was the founder of the American Birth Control League (later renamed Planned Parenthood). She was a progressive and a eugenicist.

According to dictionary.com, eugenics is defined as "the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics)."

...

Once America saw that the consequences of unbridled eugenics was the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II, it became unfashionable to support eugenics. Sanger attempted to distance herself from eugenics, but even in this rather sanitized interview with Mike Wallace from 1957, she reveals her dark motivations.

"I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world — that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit."

Biting ad. I doubt very much that Grayson anticipated an attack along these lines.

posted by Ace at 01:34 PM

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