Friday, September 8, 2017

All The Little Things

Occasionally it is good to step away from the mania coming from the White House or the sociopaths sent to Congress and state offices by right wing authoritarian follower republicans. Usually it is no less crazy, horrible, or outrageous but at least on a smaller scale with fewer repercussions to society at large. Almost three years ago I witnessed first hand the Ministry of Truth altering the past for true party members. The manager at a Florida hardware store put up a bunch of little American flags on the public right-of-way in front of the store and the city asked him to move it when copy cats littered other right-of-ways (inspired of course by Fox News, who then got to report on the outrageous and oppressive local government overreach). Next time I checked, poof, gone. That was funny. Then the minor pearl-clutching by loonies about the imminent banning of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was fun for seeing giant straw men careening down the slippery slope of right wing fever swamp water slides. Amazingly enough that one disappeared too from the link I used, but Huffpost saved the story for posterity. Finally the too smart by half thought leaders of tier 4 internet 'wingers that took the "socialist" part of national socialism literally and pasted it onto Bernie Sanders, admittedly one of many and there's no reason to believe it didn't originate in Russia.

Then there are more important stories that sometimes tangentially relate to my research. Such as when Ben Carson took a big, derpy swipe at Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. Or very serious trolls try to pin a lie about Sanger on Hillary Clinton. I mean, dang, the authoritarians just throw any lie they can dribble out of those diseased brains out there in the never ending war on liberalism and empirical truth. After Charlottesville it is going to be a little harder for Nazi sympathizing trolls to take this particular line of attack, but you know it's going to keep going.

About a month ago I posted this story to the blog's Facebook page about a judge in Tennessee offering thirty days off of prison sentences to convicts who agree to long-term birth control. As I was writing about the American origin of many Nazi race laws and practices the other day it popped back into my mind and I realized I hadn't heard any follow-up stories about it. Progressive sources treated the story like it was the first step towards coercive sterilizations and the rebirth of eugenics. But it fizzled out because the judge immediately rescinded his order when the health department said they weren't offering vasectomies or Nexplanon long acting birth control. Or that they withdrew the offer, it seems a bit he said/she said. So it's all over but the shouting, in this case the shouting is a lawsuit. That seems to be as far as the story went to date.

So next I went looking for some interpretations of the story and found two essays written by different lawyers. The first is from Jeffrey Carr of Grossman Law Offices and Attorney Carr, who used a personal anecdote to illustrate that people in jail are desperate and would jump at any chance to get out early but then focused on the practical and legal implications of the program. It was a good chance to think about the nature of coercion and society's options for "freeing poor people from the burden of raising children," without being overly preachy and morally outraged. On the other hand is Daniel Horwitz writing at the Supreme Court of Tennessee Blog, whose outrage knows no boundaries. He did hold out until the seventh paragraph before breaking Godwin's Law, but receives strong style points for coining the term "eugenics discount" in the first. Horwitz writes that involuntary sterilization is defined as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court without noting that the United States is a conspicuous non-signatory to the Statute and furious opponent of the ICC. He continues that:
To be absolutely and unequivocally clear: eugenics is illegal.  In America, reproductive freedom is a fundamental constitutional right, and the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution forbids the government from treating people differently based on whether or not they choose to exercise their right to reproductive freedom.  Tennessee’s criminal code also contains several specifically-designated mitigating factors and enhancement factors that judges are permitted to consider during sentencing.  Whether a defendant has submitted to sterilization is not among them.
While providing links to the Rome Statute in the previous paragraph and to his previous writings on the outrage of jail time for minor traffic offenses, Attorney Horwitz couldn't even point the reader to a Wikipedia article on the constitutional or legal status of eugenics while making his point. Then he calls for the judge to be impeached, disbarred, and have his law degree revoked. And surprise, surprise Attorney Horwitz is the leader of the lawsuit against Judge Benningfield. The whole tone of the article is "you either agree with me with enthusiasm or you're wrong!"  It's at least mildly humorous. Personally, depending on the day, I'm not sure we don't do enough to encourage people to get sterilized before leaving high school, but it might just be that confirmed misanthrope Chez Pazienza talking through me from beyond the grave.

Here's the thing, when Sir Francis Galton invented eugenics he was much more concerned with increasing the birth rate among smart and capable people than of reducing it among the degenerate. When a third of conscripts failed their physical to fight the Boers in South Africa, English eugenicists were concerned with strengthening the working class men of draft age who would be called upon to defend the Empire. There is nothing intrinsic to eugenics that must be genocidal. It is a question of the relative value of life. When eugenics caught on among certain Progressives before WWI their goal was to reduce the number of imbeciles in the next generation by segregating the unfit of this generation, those with fair skin tone. Though my research is far from complete, it generally seems that life became less valued after WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic. This led to the rounding up and deportation of thousands of "dangerous radical aliens" and clampdowns on immigration in this country. That is also when involuntary sterilizations took off, the general zeitgeist seemed to be that there are too many people around and too many of them are stupid and unworthy so we the worthy are just going to eliminate their proliferation. Life in general seemed to become more valued after WWII and the holocaust.

Do we face a similar situation today? With the loud and growing chorus of anti-immigrant sentiment and weakening of taboos against white supremacy that doughface donny and his ilk represent? Is the country and the world growing so crowded that people are getting less sentimental about the value of life? This could be part of the reason that I couldn't find any fundamentalist "christian" pro-life, pro-forced birth, pro-rapists' rights assholes decrying the loss of reproductive capacity for druggies in Tennessee. That is a little story for another day though.