Re-debating eugenics

Maybe it's the increasingly lax moderation, or the recent purges, or just inevitable ideological drift. But Free Republic is kind of traveling back in time. They've had the Civil Rights and gender norms of the 1950s for a while now, but now they're back in the 1930s, reconsidering Eugenics. Not that they call it Eugenics - that's a bad thing liberals like Hitler liked!

rawcatslyentist is on a first name basis with one Adolph H.

Just because Adolph did something doesn't make it evil! Good highways and trains running on time are not evil.

What's wrong with sterilizing welfare recipients after their first child? I would force them to love and care for their offspring rather than look at them as how many numbers of checks they can force the Gibsmedat to write out.

You may think me cruel. Put yourself in the shoes of a child welfare SLAVE! What kind of outlook on life do they have? Momma created me for another 500 bucks a month?

Go on call me cruel.

Slings and Arrows's consent-based philosophy is only about four decades out of date. Congrats!

My older brother was born with a minor brain injury, made poor decicions in high school, got a girl pregnant and married her, went on welfare, had another child ... and his caseworker offered him a financial incentive if he’d get a vasectomy. My brother thought that was a great deal (he couldn’t really care for his two kids, who ended up being adopted by my parents), so he took the money and had the procedure. He’s fine with it — it allowed him to be less restrained with his sexuality, and he made a few easy dollars. Was my brother, whose brain doesn’t work quite right, “coerced”? Maybe. But we’re all fine with it.

Your older brother is an interesting case. I would say that whether or not his sterilization was ethical would depend on whether he was capable of giving informed consent; i.e., whether or he was capable of understanding what he was consenting to and making the choice rationally.

But Slings and Arrows also cautions that it's probably bad, because Liberals secretly love it:

Yeah, I know that a lot of the victims were probably people that we wouldn't want to breed, but keep something in mind: The Leftists would be happy to see us all in prison, and they've noticed that we outbreed them.

Steamburg agrees - Eugenics is liberal, and therefore per-se bad.

It seems that people are forgetting that we had the Fabian Socialists and Eugenics as government policy under both Wilson and Roosevelt. This isn’t a NAZI problem it is a problem that stems from the earliest Progressive movement in America.

If Planned Parenthood had worked as originally conceived by Margaret Sanger, there would be no blacks left in America, but then somebody realized that they needed the votes. The left is a friend to power not mankind. Victim-hood is a very slippery slope.

Mrs. Don-o has no problem with the Civil Rights bit, only with some sort of bodily integrity thing:

I’m not objecting to sterilization because it’s cruel. I’m objecting because it’s maiming. And doing it to somebody without consent is a serious violation of medical ethics (no doctor should consent to do it) as well as, legally, battery.

Ayep, Mrs. Don-o wants some kind of slut-leash laws:

I'm saying that human beings, by their very nature, could and should control their sex instincts. Not that all of them do. But those who truly cannot, should not be allowed out in public without a keeper and a short leash.

The task before us, is to rebuild human beings.