Last week I mentioned that contemporary progressives still have a certain nostalgia for the eugenic impulses of their 20th century forebears but are usually careful to keep their sympathies to themselves. Occasionally, though, someone says something, like Justice Ginsburg did the other day (see link), that causes eyebrows to rise.
I've been admonished for concluding too much from one person's slip, but it's not just one person who affords us glimpses into the progressive mindset.
Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Houston to receive Planned Parenthood's highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award. Here's what First Things (subscription required) says about the event:
In her acceptance speech, Mrs. Clinton took time to laud the organization's founder: "I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision ....I am really in awe of her."
Now Margaret Sanger was both a eugenicist and a racist, a woman who saw abortion as a means of limiting the growth of the black population. That was a large part of the vision, perhaps the dominant part, that Mrs. Clinton so deeply admires.
I know some might be saying that just because Mrs. Clinton praised Sanger it doesn't follow that she embraces all of Ms. Sanger's dreams and hopes. Perhaps not, but given that this was the main force motivating Sanger's founding of Planned Parenthood it makes it a little difficult to think that Clinton did not have this in mind.
Moreover, some readers might recall that the left went into high dudgeon a few years back when on the occasion of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday Senator Trent Lott praised him by saying he would have made a good president had he been elected when he ran for the office way back in 1948. Lott was just being kind, but since Thurmond was, in his early years, a segregationist the left demanded and got Lott's resignation as Senate Majority Leader. Praising a superannuated former segregationist, we were told, said something unsavory about Lott and, indeed, about Republicans in general.
Obviously, the same standard doesn't apply to Democrats like Ms Clinton who is "in awe" of a racist eugenicist. No one has called for her resignation, and hardly anyone has noted that her praise of Sanger's "vision" was arguably worse than Lott's compliment to an old man who had been in the Senate since before most Americans were born.
RLC
