jonb02 said:
Sapper Redux said:
Again with the selective quotations. Number 12 is especially insulting to the intelligence of anyone who is even slightly familiar with the material. It's impressive how Sanger has become the embodiment of evil for some folks. Never mind the abysmal poverty and treatment of women that she was fighting against.
Yep, Sanger was a eugenicist. So was almost every other educated person in the US and Europe during the first 3 decades of the 20th century. Eugenics was quite popular amongst Christian leadership, as well.
https://religionandpolitics.org/2021/05/12/the-eugenics-roots-of-evangelical-family-values/
Shout out to the leadership of the Catholic Church in this one area for largely opposing "negative" eugenics, though individual Catholics were not always on board with the leadership and the church did offer some support to "positive" eugenics efforts.
Sanger is a "founding father" of your movement and words absolutely matter especially from founding fathers, agreed?
You aren't denying that the foundation of the pro choice movement is based on eugenics AND racism. You aren't denying that the only thing that changed was the narrative so as not to scare people off of the movement. Since you can't possibly defend your movements origins you have resorted to deflecting. Classic move.
I will pray for Jesus to soften your heart.
Lying about history, particularly if it somehow impugns 'the right' today is his specialty, but somehow twisting Sanger into a victim who represented an evolutionary step of conservative evangelicals in the US is an impressive feat of deception/dishonesty even for him.
"Sanger was an exemplar of Christian eugenicists."
No. Just as her father became a socialist,
she and her husband absolutely did, and they were card carrying members, even if she eventually dropped doctrinal Marxism.
She, like her father, rejected Christianity/Roman Catholicism.
Quote:
Sanger's parents were Roman Catholics, but Michael Higgins later became an atheist. He "took up socialism because he believed it Christian philosophy put into practice" because "to me its ideals come nearest to carrying out what Christianity was supposed to do," Sanger recalled in her autobiography.
In 1902, Margaret Higgins married William (originally Wilhelm) "Bill" Sanger, a German-born architect and artist who immigrated to the United States with his family in 1878. In 1906, the couple moved to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where William Sanger designed and built their house.
If Michael Higgins held to the relatively benign socialism of the late 19th century, Bill Sanger was a radical.
The Sangers joined the newly formed Socialist Party of America, which supported the abolition of private property. In 1911, Bill Sanger ran (and lost) as the Socialist Party candidate for the New York City Board of Aldermen. He also helped organize the Syndicalist League of North America, a revolutionary labor group created by Marxist organizer William Z. Foster to "bore from within" the American Federation Labor (AFL) into supporting syndicalism, a form of union-based socialism.
Bill was well-connected to the who's who of the early 20th-century American Left, introducing his wife to his personal friend and five-time Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene Debs; John "Jack" Reed, who sympathetically documented the 1917 Russian Revolution; Communist Party USA chairwoman and American Civil Liberties Union co-founder Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who died during a visit to the Soviet Union; communist Alexander Berkman; anarchist Emma Goldman; and William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood, who founded Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a communist labor front.
She recounted that "our living room became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, socialists, and IWW's could meet," mostly so they could trade ideas with Bill.
Margaret, however, was less committed to the socialist cause than her husband. "My own personal feelings drew me towards the individualist, anarchist philosophy," she wrote in her autobiography. "It seemed to me necessary to approach the ideal by way of Socialism . . . . Therefore, I joined the Socialist Party."
This was before the advent of Birth Control philosophy, when Sanger was still blending bits of leftist thought to form a larger ideology. Perhaps more influential in that process than socialism was her newfound atheism. Like her father, she was an iconoclast irritated by convention. "The whole sickly business of society today is a sham," the young Sanger scribbled in her journal. Channeling Marx's famous quip about "the opiate of the people," she criticized "the vapid innocuities of religion" for drugging the working class into contentment. The founding statement of her 1914 magazine Woman Rebel was "No Gods, No Masters."
Although she eventually dropped doctrinal Marxism, its coarse view of religion remained central to Margaret Sanger's worldview. In time, she abandoned socialism altogether as unhelpful in achieving Birth Control's final goals, yet socialist politics served as Sanger's introduction to activism.
Sanger is a
patron saint of the American left, no doubt, as one of the first to unite it, even if many of the things she said, including skepticism of abortion itself, would render her a persona non grata today. Yet, to somehow claim/stake an argument that she represented conservative Christian thought in her time/work…is a lie that must not just be rebutted/rejected, but pointed at and mocked.
Then, just as today, some nominal Roman Catholics in American politics/society (generally on the left, not limited to the Pelosi's/Biden's of the world) embraced infanticide/were racist, but that's not a reason to blame the denomination/Church itself for their failures, or her manipulation of some toward her goals.
