You are here: Home » Adult Webmaster News » Latest Target in Wingers' War on Women: Margaret...
Select year   and month 
 
September 01, 2015

Latest Target in Wingers' War on Women: Margaret Sanger's Bust

JESUSLAND—In the early years of the 20th century, few were as dedicated to improving the lives of women as Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League, which eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America—you know: the organization that every right-wing/religious organization in the country is trying to drive out of business by posting heavily-edited "gotcha" videos on YouTube which purport to show Planned Parenthood personnel selling aborted baby parts for cash. Except, of course, they weren't. But within the past couple of days, the Right-Wing Religious Nutjobs (RWRN) have found a new target: the bust of Sanger being displayed in the National Portrait Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Seems that the party that wants to ship all undocumented immigrants back to their home countries (at a cost of roughly $137 billion) and wants to build a wall along the entire 1,954 miles of the U.S./Mexico border is now upset because Sanger once believed, according to a post by American Experience on the PBS.org website, that her aim to provide women with access to birth control was allied with that of early-century eugenicists, some of whom believed that "birth control was a useful tool for curbing procreation among the 'weak.' " "In 1920 Sanger publicly stated that 'birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives,' " The American Experience post states. However, it continues, "Sanger's relationship with the eugenics movement was complex—part strategy and part ideology. Many historians now believe that Sanger opposed eugenics along racial lines. Furthermore, Sanger opposed the belief of many eugenicists that poverty was hereditary, asserting instead that poverty, criminal behavior and other social problems were due to environmental factors and were not predetermined." The point is, Sanger eventually realized that eugenics was no cure for society's ills, and she was particularly appalled by the eugenicists so fully embedded in the Nazi regime in Germany. "Sanger never accepted the racial hierarchies that led to the deadly racist policies of the Nazis," stated one of the writers for the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University. "Rather, she vehemently rejected any definition of the 'unfit' when it referred 'to race or religions.' " Whatever Sanger's true beliefs were regarding selective breeding in general, what is undeniable is that without her, today's women would likely have little if any access to birth control and would therefore be at the mercy of their husbands and others regarding how and when they would get pregnant—and that's pretty much exactly what religous conservatives want all women to be. "Planned Parenthood and others inside this building want to pretend that we really don't know," said L. Brent Bozell, founder and president of the ultra-right-wing Media Research Center at a press conference outside the National Portrait Gallery on Thursday. "We do know. She wrote books, she gave speeches, she wrote letters. She organized organizations like the Negro Project to eradicate blacks; why? Because you weren't quite human. You were weeds, you were waste. And that couldn't stand in a fixed society. Ladies and gentlemen, so did Goebbels. He thought the exact same thing and did the exact same thing through eugenics." Actually, the "Negro Project" as Sanger first envisioned it was to help "a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a 'caste' system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation." However, by 1940, she had lost control of the project and later deplored the racist turn it had made. But attention to actual history has never been the RWRNs' strong suit, and so a person and a series of projects intended to help blacks and others gain control over their reproductive choices has now been recharacterized as essentially a race war, and conservative Bishop E.W. Jackson, head of the conservative religious group Staying True to America's National Destiny (STAND), has now delivered a petition with 14,000 signers calling for the Smithsonian to remove Sanger's bust from the National Portrait Gallery's "The Struggle for Justice" exhibit, apparently because it sits too close to "depictions" of Martin Luther King Jr. (who praised Sanger's work with minorities in his 1966 acceptance speech of the Margaret Sanger Award) and anti-segregation hero Rosa Parks. "The woman was a racist," Jackson declared at the press conference. "She was a genocidal figure in America and in human history, and to honor her is to be complicit in her evil and her racism." Bozell added that her bust should be put in a "far off place," in a "deep hole," and then "apologize to the dirt." For its part, the National Portrait Gallery is having none of it. "No one has to pass a moral test to be included in a museum," stated Bethany Bentley, the Gallery's head of communications and public affairs. "Everyone has something in their background or beliefs, especially looking back at history. You can look at every president up to Zachary Taylor — they owned slaves." The press conference and its petition are easily understood to be a piece with conservatives' battle to deny Planned Parenthood any federal funding, even if the organization doesn't use any of those funds to perform abortions—but does use them to pay for birth control options for the poor. "There is no doubt that Margaret Sanger made some controversial, harmful statements that Planned Parenthood does not uphold," said Alencia Johnson, a Planned Parenthood spokesperson. "What we do know is that her fight for birth control access for all women—and her partnership with leaders like W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell—has helped millions of women and people to this day. With far too many black women facing unequal access to proper reproductive health care and sex education, leaders of the faith community of all backgrounds have advocated with Planned Parenthood to provide more access to health care. Unlike those staging the protest today, Planned Parenthood trusts that black women can and will make the best decisions for their lives and families." Perhaps the public will remember this bullshit "controversy" come election time, and vote accordingly. Pictured: Margaret Sanger at a congressional hearing.

 
home | register | log in | add URL | add premium URL | forums | news | advertising | contact | sitemap
copyright © 1998 - 2009 Adult Webmasters Association. All rights reserved.