Reflections on Roe: When Margaret Sanger Spoke to the KKK

[Valin]

The American Spectator:

Someone owes Steve Scalise a huge apology.

Paul Kengor

1.22.15

 

As liberals excoriate Republican Congressman Steve Scalise for speaking to a group with a reported connection to David Duke, former KKK member, I’m reminded today—on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade—of a moment that liberals will never dare acknowledge: a 1926 speech to the KKK by one of their most revered ideological darlings, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

 

(Snip)

 

The Planned Parenthood founder’s KKK talk was apparently a smash hit. Not only did it go very late, after a very long wait, but no less than “a dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” Wow.

 

Liberals, of course, will excuse all of this, as they do for all their icons, especially on matters of race, from Woodrow Wilson’s actions toward blacks to FDR’s internment of the Japanese (just for starters).

 

(Snip)

 

One might ask, why would the KKK be so interested in Ms. Sanger? The reasons are obvious, a natural fit.

 

Sanger was a passionate racial-eugenicist with a crowning vision for what she openly called “race improvement.” The Planned Parenthood founder lamented America’s “race of degenerates.” The nation’s landscape needed to be purged of its “human weeds” and “the dead weight of human waste.” This included the “feeble-minded,” the “insane,” and the just plain “idiots.” Sanger shared the disparaging view of humanity held by another progressive icon, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who declared that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Like Holmes, and, for that matter, like Adolf Hitler—who was an obviously more aggressive racial-eugenicist—Sanger hoped to finesse and refine the “gene pool.” She would do so not with gas chambers and concentration camps but with birth-control pills, eliminating human life before conception rather than after birth. Thus, her Planned Parenthood, which was originally called the American Birth Control League.

 

One of Sanger’s favorite slogans, so much so that it adorned the masthead of her Birth Control Review, was this: “Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.”

 

(Snip)

[Valin]