Day 3: argument from John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe
Mr. Parrott is working hard to protect shreds of the eugenics movement’s agenda from the 1920s. That destructive agenda is mostly dismantled, and the remaining evil will also be dismantled. But why does he cling to it?
At the beginning of the 20th century, the eugenics movement, which sought to breed a better human race by social control of reproduction, was successful in passing laws with three goals: (1) prohibiting racially mixed marriages, or “miscegenation,” and (2) permitting and carrying out government-ordered sterilization of some of the children of God whom the eugenicists called “feeble-minded,” and (3) restricting immigration.
The new wave of anti-miscegenation laws pushed through by the eugenics movement strengthened the old patchwork of anti-black laws. They were state laws, not Federal, but it was a national movement. The point was not so much to keep slaves and their descendants in place, as to maintain the purity of the “white race.” In 1967, the Supreme Court struck them down (in Loving v. Virginia).
The forced sterilization laws gave health departments the authority to identify people who they believed were likely to have babies with mental problems, and to sterilize them as a public health measure. During the next 40 years, hospitals in 30 states destroyed the reproductive ability of over 60,000 people. The “proof” of their “feeble-mindedness” was remarkably sketchy, targeting people with tuberculosis (not genetic), or in one famous case (Carrie Buck’s mother in Buck v. Bell) for being an uppity bag lady with a smart mouth. The laws were never over-ruled by the Supreme Court, but died out by the 1960s.
The third major push of the eugenics movement was restricting immigration. Before the 1920s, there was a messy patchwork of laws – one law to keep out the Chinese, another against the Japanese, another against Filipinos, another against Indians. In 1921, there was a reform that set up a quota system, favoring northern Europeans and restricting everyone else in varying degrees. That law, refined in 1924, kept out Jews fleeing from Hitler.
In 1965, President Johnson pushed through a reform of immigration policy. He described the old eugenics policy as “un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.” Unfortunately, he left some key principles in place. The scandal of America turning away refugees from China’s forced abortion policy was after Johnson’s gutsy reform. The scandal of Southeast Asian refugees drowning by the boatload for years before America decided we could help old allies was after Johnson’s brave but partial reform. And in the same year that he signed the bill, new forms of discrimination – now focused on Latinos – took shape.
So today, we are still dealing with bitter leftovers from the 1920s eugenics movement. Mr. Parrott adamantly refuses to welcome millions of immigrants, extending some of the worst practices of our proud but checkered history.
Why?
Mr. Parrott?
