In this episode Trent critically examines the Supreme Court’s recent decision on LGBT issues and asks why historical figures like Margaret Sanger are immune to “cancel culture.” Trent also helps us avoid using weak arguments against Sanger’s work and reveals the dirty truth about her eugenic mission.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
I am tired. I just got back from Edmund, Oklahoma. It was a great trip. I had a blast. I took my wife and kids to see her sister and brother-in-law. And my kids had a great time with their cousins. They got to ride go-karts, they hopped in the pool, chased the chickens around. It was a wonderful time for them. And I had a wonderful time. I even sat down with my brother and sister-in-law and recorded an episode of Free for All Friday on Living on the Land. So how do you raise your own chickens? How do you raise your own cows? You too can get your own eggs and your own beef if you’re willing to work at it. If you want to learn more about that, check out Free for All Friday this Friday. It’s an interview I think you’re really going to enjoy.
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Now onto the subject of today’s episode. In the back half of the episode, I’m going to talk about statues that are being torn down. I’m not going to talk about the statues related to the Confederacy because that is controversial, and that would deserve its own show to be able to go through. But people are tearing down statues like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. They’re tearing down Winston Churchill in England because he’s apparently a symbol of fascism, even though he fought fascists in World War II. He led the fight against them.
So people, read your history books and here in California, people have been tearing down statues of Father Junípero Serra. So they’re doing all of that. And what I want to point out, especially in this episode is a double standard that these people who are tearing down statues of Washington or Father Junípero Serra, there are individuals in the past that also deserve cancel culture that deserve their statues, their paintings, their bust in the Smithsonian to be taken down.
And they’re not demanding it because these individuals support their ideology. One of them in particular that we’ll get to here in the back half of the episode. So stay tuned for that. On the front half of the episode, I want to talk about the recent Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County that has big ramifications for the issues related to same sex attraction and transgender identity.
So the reason that these fit well together and today’s episodes, so you have tearing down statues trying to alter historical reality. And you have people who want to tear down biological reality, who want to tear down reality and say, “Men and women are the same, but they’re also not the same because of a man says he’s a woman and you say he’s a man you’re guilty of a hate crime.” Men can become women. Women can become men trying to tear down this biological fabric of reality.
And they’ve gotten more ammunition to do that with a recent Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County. So I want to break down this case for you and show where it really falls apart. So Bostock v. Clayton County was a case that was recently decided by the Supreme Court that dealt with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or on the basis of sex.
So I remember my mom actually once went and interviewed for a job and the guy said who was interviewing her, “Well, you’d be a great candidate here, but I’m worried that you’re going to get pregnant on me. And you’re not going to be any use to me if you’re pregnant. So unfortunately, this isn’t going to work out.” Nowadays, employers cannot do that. That would be sex discrimination.
So on the basis of sex should seem to be clear, right? That if a man and woman, all other things being equal are capable of doing a job, you should have to say the woman can’t be hired to do the job simply because she is a woman. That would be sex discrimination. You ought to treat men and women equally in hiring and firing practices. Not controversial, right? Well, it becomes controversial in cases where you take the phrase on the basis of sex from Title VII and try to apply it to sexual orientation and transgender identity.
So here’s what happened. There were actually three plaintiffs involved. Gerald Bostock was fired after he expressed interest in a gay softball league at work. So he was fired because of his sexual orientation, his sexual attractions, and probably his sexual behavior as well. I don’t know the details about that case, but it’s similar to another case Altitude Express, Inc v. Zarda. Both of those dealt with discrimination on sexual orientation. The other one that was bundled into this was R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. the EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity commission.
And so this dealt with the case of a funeral home that fired, I believe it was a man who later came to identify as transgender and wanted to wear women’s apparel to work. Even though the funeral home said, “No, the clothing that we expect for employees to wear at our funeral home, we expect men to wear this particular kind of clothing and women to wear this kind of clothing. And you are not a woman. You are a man.” And so, on June 15, 2020, the court ruled in a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch covering all three cases saying that that discrimination on sexual orientation and gender identity is included in the because of sex clause, that is in Title VII.
And so what Gorsuch said was that, “Look, we know that in 1964, when Title VII was passed, the Civil Rights Act was passed, nobody was thinking about sexual orientation or gender identity.” But even still, he claims that the meaning of the words apply to sexual orientation and gender identity. Because if you refuse to hire someone or fire someone because of their sexual orientation or because they identify as transgender, sex has something to do with it indirectly is Gorsuch’s argument.
And of course, this is disappointing for me to see. I expected Roberts to go along with this. It’s always funny when I read news accounts that says things. “Justice Roberts sided with the liberal block of the court in today’s hearing.” I’m like, “Sided with the liberals.” He’s basically already halfway there. I mean, that’s just kind of the history that he’s given on the court over and over again in his decisions, but it was difficult to see Justice Gorsuch say this because Gorsuch actually has written a lot of other great pieces.
I have his book actually here on my Kindle. I was doing research on assisted suicide and euthanasia a while back for my master’s degree in bioethics. And so, I was looking at resources on assisted suicide and I saw that Justice Gorsuch had actually written a whole book. I think it was called the Future of Assisted Suicide, making legal arguments against it. So I thought, “Oh, this is great. I really love this guy’s writing.” But now I see this and I say, “Hey, wait a minute. Ah, what’s going on here?”
So here’s what he writes in his majority opinion. “In Title VII, Congress outlaw discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear, an employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undiscussable role in the decision. Exactly what Title VII forbids.”
This is a kind of a bait and switch here. Title VII is talking about on the basis of sex, firing someone just because they are a man or just because they’re a woman. But what the plaintiff’s arguing in the case and what Gorsuch and six members of the Supreme Court sided on was that, “Look, if you fire somebody because they have same sex attraction.” Or let’s say they because they engage in same-sex behavior. So if you are a Catholic school and now this doesn’t necessarily apply to religious organizations, we’ll get to that here shortly.
But let’s say you’re a Catholic school who fires a teacher for marrying another man, a male teacher who marries a man under the reasoning here in Bostock, You would say that is discrimination on the basis of sex. Because if a woman had married a man, you would have had no problem with it. But because it’s a man who’s marrying a man, you have a problem with it. So if you find this logic to be sneaky, you’re not alone. I find it to be sneaky as well.
So here’s the example Gorsuch uses in his case, he uses two. Uses one for sexual orientation and and then another one for transgender identity. For sexual orientation, he writes this. “Consider for example an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are to the employee’s mind materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason, other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.”
And now this is what happens here, we are sewing here the seeds of saying that sex is a morally neutral act. That when we look in the law and we say, “Look, the sex is a morally neutral act. It doesn’t really matter who you have sex with. As long as it’s consenting.” Then you get this kind of behavior where you end up saying even this the word sex. And I know this is controversial for people to hear, but it’s true. Same sex couples do not actually have sex. Now think about that. Two men or two women are incapable of engaging in the sexual act because we have to say, “Well, what is sex?”
In fact, I have read sex positive philosophers and feminists who have a really hard time defining what sex is. They understand it has something to do with genitals, but for them, they have a blurry line between sex and even things like mutual masturbation for example. Because for them, it’s just about genital stimulation. But the sexual act, what makes a sexual act a sexual act is that its ordered towards sexual reproduction. Even if that’s not always achieved because of either temporary or permanent sterility, what makes a sexual act a sexual act is its order towards sexual reproduction.
So it is not the case that you have a man and a woman, and the woman has sexual relations with a man. That’s okay. The man has sexual relations with another man, they’re not both equally engaged in the sexual act. The woman who is married to another man, she is engaged in the marital act. The man who claims he is married to a man is not engaging in the marital act. He’s not even married because that’s not what marriage is. See previous podcast episodes. See my book co-authored with Layla Miller Made This Way for the natural law definition of what marriage is.
And so we have this idea that, “Well, this doesn’t really matter who you have sex with or not.” Well, here’s an example. Could you fire someone for engaging in adultery? Let’s say you have an employee and they have a public affair and it brings a negative criticism upon your establishment. And so, they’ve engaged in adultery. They are married and they went off and had sex with someone that they are not married to. Now under the Bostock logic. I mean, most people, even many secular people will say that adultery is wrong. And this is a serious breach of character, breach of ethics, and you should be able to fire that person.
But under Bostock’s logic, you could say that this is discrimination based on marital status. Now marital status is not explicitly protected in Title VII, but it’s generally believed to be contained under the on the basis of sex clause. So discriminating against a woman, whether she’s married or single is considered to be a form of sexual discrimination. So imagine if you said, “Well, it’s discrimination to fire this man, this married man for engaging in relations with an unmarried woman. Because would you have fired an unmarried man who engaged in relations with an unmarried woman?”
Let’s say you’re just at a regular secular establishment. In many cases if an unmarried man had consensual sexual relations with an unmarried woman, in many secular institutions that they wouldn’t have a problem with that. But if it’s a married man having relations with an unmarried woman, they would have a problem. You could say, “Ah, see, you’re treating a married person differently than a single person. That’s marital discrimination. So you can’t do that.” So you see the logic here in that it treats sex as kind of this morally neutral thing that we can shuffle between individuals and claim discrimination on when that’s not the case at all.
Now here is the passage on transgender identity. So Gorsuch says, “Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who is identified as a male at birth, but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who is identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally…” And I apologize for kind of the new speak here, having things like identified as female at birth instead of a woman or a man. So he goes on and I’ll backtrack a bit.
“If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who is identified as female at birth, as opposed to the transgender employee, who is a man who claims to be a woman, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth, for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth.”
Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision. So in plain language, if you have a man and a woman who worked for you and the woman comes to work in a dress and you say, “Okay, that’s fine.” You have no problem with that. And then the man comes to work in a dress and you say, “Well, that’s not the dress code. Men don’t wear dresses here. That’s not the dress code.”
The allegation of discrimination for transgender identity comes in and saying, “Well, look, if that man were a woman, you would have treated him differently. You’re treating him differently just based on his transgender identity.” And so, this can’t stand and now it’s considered sexual discrimination. Now the transgender part of Bostock has wide-reaching implications here because while differences between race are morally trivial.
I’m not saying that race is morally trivial or racism is morally trivial. But the differences between a white person and a black person or a Latino person or an Asian person, those differences, there’s nothing that rises to the level of saying that, “Oh, this is a really important thing we have to take note of.” Racial differences are usually inconsequential. We should judge a person, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
However, sexual differences are really important. For example, we segregate sports in this case. We segregate sports all over the world because we know men and women have very distinct biological realities. And if you didn’t, for example, segregate sports, women would never really get into many organized sports because men who are on average, stronger, taller than women in many respects, would end up dominating sports and women would never be in sports at all. That’s why we have sex segregation. So we treat sexes differently and understand you treat men one way and you treat women another way, and that is not discrimination.
So here’s how the Bostock logic makes all this fall apart if you just treat men and women as being identical, as you would like a black person or a white person. So say a man enters a female locker room. The biological man enters a female locker room and then says he identifies as a woman. And of course he is then asked to leave. He doesn’t leave. And then he’s arrested. According to the logic from the Bostock case, you would say, “Well, look, if that man who identifies as a woman, he’s been arrested and not allowed to be in the locker room. If that man were a woman who identified as a woman, you would have treated him differently. So it’s discrimination there on the basis of sex.”
No, it’s not discrimination on the basis of sex. It’s recognition on the basis of sex, Ryan Anderson in his reply to this, he gives another good example. He talks about, let’s say you hire men and women to be lifeguards. Now it would be sex discrimination to say, “We’re only hiring male lifeguards. If you can show that women are capable of performing the lifeguard duties, just as well as a man.” If you say just arbitrarily, “We’re not hiring women to be lifeguards, we’re only hiring men. That would be sex discrimination.” But imagine if you had a case where one of the female lifeguards does not want to wear a bathing suit top, she only wants to wear shorts. She could claim, “Well, the male lifeguards, if I was a man, you wouldn’t get mad at me because the male lifeguards are only required to wear bottoms, not shirts. They can just wear shorts. They can have their shirt off. I should be able to do the same because if I were a man, you’d be treating me differently.”
So you see what the Bostock logic does and it’s going to have far-reaching implications. The USCCB actually had a good response to the case. I’ll read a part of what they said. They wrote, “Sex should not be redefined to include sexual inclinations or conduct nor to promulgate the view that sexual identity is solely a social construct rather than a natural or biological fact. Every human person is made in the image and likeness of God. And without exception must be treated with dignity, compassion, and respect. Protecting our neighbors from unjust discrimination does not require redefining human nature.”
Now Gorsuch with the locker room case he says, “Well, you shouldn’t worry about that because no one’s brought before the court sex segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, dress codes. We don’t see how it would apply from the narrow decision that we ruled today.” But Dan McLaughlin at National Review, he has a great response to that. He says, “This is frankly disingenuous. The Harris case is entirely about sex-specific dress codes and the necessity that enforcing them requires employers to classify their employees by sex. The same is true of sex-specific bathrooms. The court’s inability to answer those questions indicates its unwillingness to say loud, the reasoning of its decision about who is a man and who is a woman.”
So if we’re going to keep men and women from being discriminated against, right? We’re not going to discriminate, unjustly discriminate between men and women. We have to know what men and women are. What is a man and what is a woman? And if you leave it to just pure subjectivism, a man is just anyone who says they’re a man, a woman is anyone who says they’re a one, that leads to absolute chaos.
Speaking of chaos here in the great state of California, where you can always expect chaos to be reigning. They’ve torn down statues of Father Junípero Serra and I want to read to you the excerpt from the California Catholic Conference of Bishops. This was their reply to these incidents and I think it was a very helpful way of navigating the issue. So they begin with an explicit condemnation of racism. Then go on to say, “During the past week, the specific question of removing statues of political military and cultural leaders of the past has gained momentum. If this process is to be truly effective as a remedy for racism, it must discern carefully the entire contribution that the historical figure in question made to American life, especially in advancing the rights of marginalized people. And calling for the removal of images of Saint Junípero Serra from public display in California and then tearing down his statue in San Francisco and in Los Angeles, protesters have failed that test.”
As Archbishop Cordileone pointed out in his recent statement. “Saint Serra made heroic sacrifices to protect the indigenous people of California from their Spanish conquerors, especially the soldiers. Even with his infirmed leg, which caused him such pain, he walked all the way to Mexico City to obtain special faculties of governance from the Viceroy of Spain, in order to discipline the military who were abusing the Indians. And then he walked back to California.”
He goes on to say, “Serra was not simply a man of his times. And working with Native Americans, he was a man ahead of his times who made great sacrifices to defend and serve the indigenous population and work against an oppression that extends far beyond the mission era.” And so he says, “If that is not enough to legitimate a public statue in the state that he did so much to create, then virtually every historical figure from our nation’s past will have to be removed for their failings measured in the light of today’s standards.” Because people use this same stuff when they talk about previous icons in liberalism.
And the prime example, I actually tweeted about it one or two nights ago is Margaret Sanger. So Margaret Sanger was a passionate advocate of eugenics and she helped to implement policies that came to disproportionally hurt minorities and members of the African-American community. And yet she’s lauded as a hero because she promoted contraception. So it’s a giant double standard on the part of pro-choice activists Planned Parenthood activists who will say, “Oh, well, Margaret Sanger was a woman of her time. So you can’t be harsh on her for embracing eugenics. Because many learning people of her day promoted that same kind of eugenics.”
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. If you’re going to use the man or woman of her times defense for your people, then a Catholic should be okay, we’ll do the same for someone like Father Junípero Serra, who bravely stood up for the rights of indigenous people. Even though he didn’t act the way you might expect someone in the 21st century to act for example. So when we call people out, however, for Margaret Sanger and say that Margaret Sanger should not be celebrated. I did notice online some people saying that these advocates should be condemning Margaret Sanger as a racist, as someone who wanted to use abortion to eliminate the African-American population.
And here’s where I want to pump the brakes a little bit and say, we should be critical of people like Margaret Sanger, but we also have to make sure that our evidence is bulletproof. I remember my book Persuasive Pro Life, I was writing the five rules for being a pro-life apologist. And one of my rules was make your evidence bulletproof. When you criticize a position or you put forward an argument, make sure you have your bases covered and make sure you have evidence to back up the points that you make.
Because many of the points that people make on the pro-life side against Margaret Sanger, the facts don’t actually bear that out. She still advocated for odious sinful policies, contraception for sterilizations, but we have to make sure we get things right. Because if we attack Margaret Sanger with charges that are not true, then people won’t take us seriously. So remember, always make your evidence bulletproof.
So what I want to do is I want to talk briefly about Margaret Sanger, who she was and the better arguments we should make against her. When saying that if you’re going to send cancel culture against people in the past, you should send cancel culture against Margaret Sanger. So Sanger is born in 1879 to an atheist father and a Catholic mother. Her mother conceived 18 children, only 11 of whom survived. And so, Sanger saw the poverty around her and she blamed it on large families.
And her atheist father was very critical of religion and instilled some of that into Sanger. So when she grew up then in 1916, she opened America’s first birth control clinic. In 1921, she started the American Birth Control League, then a magazine the Birth Control Review. And the American Birth Control League later changed its name in the 1940s to Planned Parenthood.
All right, so let’s get the facts straight. Was Margaret Sanger for abortion? Actually, she was not for abortion. She was for abortion in cases where medical physicians believed it was is necessary to protect a woman’s life or maybe grave risk to her health. But in general, she spoke against abortion with pretty strong language. So at her first clinic that she opened in 1916, she had a pamphlet that said, “Mothers, can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them? Do not kill, do not take life, but prevent. Safe harmless information can be obtained of trained nurses at 46, Amboy Street.”
She also said of the poor, “To them, birth control does not mean what it does to us. To them, it has meant the most barbaric methods, the killing of babies, infanticide, abortions in one crude way or another. In another writing she said, “While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion is justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
So she was very strongly against abortion, but she was also strongly in favor of contraception. So we shouldn’t forget that. “Contraception is an intrinsic evil that brings harm upon the family, harm upon society.” So she was promoting an intrinsic evil. Sanger was not promoting the intrinsic evil of abortion. And we have to get that right, because if we go around saying that Margaret Sanger was opening abortion clinics or abortion facilities, people are going to say, “You don’t even get your facts, right? Why should I trust what you have to listen to?”
So she was against abortion, but she was very in favor of contraception. And she saw contraception as a way to try to prevent abortion. Now, was she racist? The evidence that Margaret Sanger was racist, I would say is actually shaky. That’s not the argument we should lean on as Catholics or as pro-lifers. Rather, there’s ironclad evidence that she was an ableist, that she was a bigot. An ableist to someone who has prejudice and bigotry towards those who are disabled, either physically or mentally. But even for Sanger among the disabled, among those she would consider less fit for her eugenic programs would have included the poor as well.
So let’s just put the facts out there. She published the Birth Control Review, which became a place where many other writers promoted eugenics. And so sometimes when people quote Margaret Sanger and say, “Oh, Margaret Sanger said, this look how terrible it is.” They’re actually quoting the Birth Control Review, which is a magazine that had a wide array of opinions in it. And so, we have to make that clear. Just because you publish a magazine doesn’t mean you agree with every single opinion that is in the magazine that you publish. And some of these are falsely attributed to Sanger.
One would be by W.E.B. Du Bois. So here’s the quote, “The massive ignorant Negros still breed carelessly and disastrously so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit and least able to rear their children properly.”
Now, if Margaret Sanger said this, I mean, that would be easy category for cancel culture to say this is racist, but it’s not saying who said this. It was actually said by an African-American socialist in the early part of the 20th century W.E.B. Du Bois. So Du Bois was black, but he was also an eugenicist. He believed that just as there were eugenicists to believe that only the fittest most intelligent best stock among white people should breed and reproduce. Du Bois believed that only the fittest, smartest members of the African-American should be able to reproduce. And that unfit stock or defective genes should not be passed on.
Now, Margaret Sanger did say something else that can be read as being racist, but the problem is it can also plausibly be read as not being racist. Here’s what she said. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” So Margaret Sanger did say this, and it’s in relation to the Negro Project, which was a project she created to help get contraceptives into African-American communities.
So you can look at this quote in one of two ways. You can read it as she is saying the quiet part loud, the loud part quiet. She’s saying, “We don’t want them to figure out that we want to exterminate the Negro population with contraceptives. We don’t want people to figure that out.” But the problem is that critics can plausibly argue, they can plausibly argue that what she meant was we don’t want people to get the crazy idea that we want to exterminate the Negro population. So we need black ministers to go out and straighten them out so that they don’t have this false idea arise in their minds.
So since the quote can be read in one of two ways, and it is plausible to read it in that way. If that’s the strongest piece of evidence you have that Margaret Sanger is racist, then you don’t have really strong evidence. Once again, don’t lean into your weaker argument, lean into your stronger argument that we’ll get to that she was an ableist and she was a bigot. She was an eugenicist, a misanthrope. That’s what we should be leaning into.
And one other point people will bring up is that she once addressed a women’s auxiliary meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. And I read that portion of her autobiography where she describes doing that. And what she said was, “Well, she went to that group because any group that was interested in hearing me talk was a good group. Any group that could be aroused was a good group.”
So she was willing to make allies even with more unsavory characters. And she goes on to say that, “She had to put things in simple terms like she was talking to children.” And she didn’t seem highly enamored of them, but it could also be the case that in that passage, she says that, “She didn’t want to even mention the word portion or get the wrong idea because these people seem more conservative than other people she had addressed.” So she did address the Ku Klux Klan though, there is a picture that’s going around the internet you can find of Margaret Sanger at a Ku Klux Klan rally, people are like saluting her. That’s fake. That’s Photoshopped. Don’t pass that around. People will call you out on it and say you don’t know what you’re talking about.
So she addressed the KKK, the women’s auxiliary meeting, which was also anti-Catholic at that time as well. But that’s not evidence that she endorsed all their views because she says in her autobiography, she would speak to any group that was willing to listen to her. So just to reaffirm, I am not defending Margaret Sanger. She is an odious depraved person. But I’m saying that when you go out to criticize her, put forward your best evidence that you have.
If you’re going to get a quote from Margaret Sanger, make sure you can get it from a site. This is the guy who wrote what the saints never said. I’m big about substantiating quotes. When you put forward a quote from someone especially to disparage their character and show that they were a bad person, you got to make sure you can track down that quote, either to a primary or to a reliable secondary source that would have knowledge of the person in question.
So if you’re showing a quote from Margaret Sanger saying she’s a bad person, make sure your source is not this Catholic website or this pro-life website. Make sure you can go back to the original to be able to show it. So I went to NYU’s website, New York University, and they have a section on their website, the Margaret Sanger Papers, and there you’ve got ample evidence of her eugenic motives, of her ableism, her prejudice, her bigotry. Here’s the things that she did say that deserve cancel culture today.
She said, “In any effort to cleanse and regenerate the race.” And here it’s not the white race, it’s just the human race. “Something must be done about the feebleminded as well as the insane. Feeblemindedness is the more serious of the problems, because it is an absolute dead weight on the race,” the human race. “It is an evil that is unmitigated. The heavy and complicated social burdens and injuries it inflicts on the present generation are without compensation. As it is inheritable, it renders it a deteriorating poison and depreciates the whole quality of the people.”
So the idea with eugenics was that not just mental or physical handicaps, but even being less intelligent or being a criminal. It was thought that your children would directly inherit those traits. So there were laws that were passed to sterilize criminals, because the idea was you don’t want criminals breeding more criminals. And then later that was determined to be unconstitutional. So what does she do though about these feebleminded mentally handicapped, physically handicapped people who are a drain on society?
Here are the solutions that Sanger proposes. She says, “Birth control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society, and the gradual suppression elimination and eventual extinction of defective stocks. Those human weeds, which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” So she’s saying we need birth control, but not for rich people, not for people who have act together who have all the desirable traits.
We need birth control for the poor people, which invariably ended up effecting minorities and African-Americans because they were existed in higher populations among the poor. So even if Margaret Sanger was not a de jure, de jure in de facto in law. Even if she was not an explicit racist, even if you could not prove that she was explicitly racist or hated blacks or minorities, she was a defacto racist and that the policies that she promoted had severe and profound negative effects for African-Americans, for members of minority communities.
Because they made up more than numbers of these “defective stocks” that Sanger said needed to be called. She says, “Birth control aims to introduce into the creation of the next generation of American citizens. The sound and scientific principles observed by the gardener and the agriculturalist.” She says, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Birth control is not as advanced as a panacea, by which past and present evils of dysgenesis genic breeding can be magically eliminated.”
She says, “Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.” So not just promoting the intrinsic evil of contraception, but Margaret Sanger in her goal to eliminate the “feebleminded,” “imbeciles,” these “human weeds to remove these undesirable elements of society.” So she didn’t just want people to voluntarily use birth control. That was her plan A was just get birth control out there, wide scale, easily accessible, and then will just use birth control. And that was her plan A, her voluntary kind of eugenic movement where the undesirables use birth control a lot and the desirables don’t.
But her plan B would be to forcibly sterilize individuals to prevent them from reproducing their defective stock. She says when it comes to what should be done about the undesirables, “This could be done by a vigorous educational campaign and a request to those who have such taint to present themselves for consultation. There could then be commissions of authorities to investigate the case and advise according to the circumstances, either sterilization or methods of contraception.”
So the idea was once again, plan A people present themselves. We see if they need to be sterilized. We give you birth control. She even advocated for paying people to sterilize themselves, which of course is highly unethical when you take advantage of poor people who desperately need money. That’s why it’s illegal to sell your organs here in the United States, because that would end up a lot of people who are poor would make a rash decision and sell a kidney when they probably shouldn’t. You would end up extorting the poor and the marginalized to serve the needs of the wealthy and the well off.
So once again, plan A is voluntary, but plan B always as a fallback for Sanger is forcible sterilization, which was held up in 1922 by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell. The Supreme Court said, “You could forcibly sterilize people.” That ruling’s been overturned today, but it was enforced during Sanger’s time. She said, “Under no circumstances should the state allow such to cast their disease and demented progeny upon society for the normal and fit to provide for.” So I think that deserves cancel culture.
I am not defending Margaret Sanger. I’m just saying that if you’re going to criticize her, if you’re going to criticize anyone, make sure that you have valid evidence. If you’re going to produce a quote from someone that shows they have bad character or engaged in bad actions, make sure the quote is authentic and make sure the quote is not taken out of context. So what I would take from this is that the case for Margaret Sanger being racist is shaky. The case for her being ableist is ironclad.
She had a bigoted prejudice towards those who are mentally and physically handicapped, even people who were poor. And so her policies that led to forced sterilizations, they disproportionately affected the African-American community. You go to North Carolina that practiced a lot, 7,000 forced sterilizations between 1929 and 1976. 65% of those were done on African-American women, even though those women made up only about 25% of the state’s population. So have here that Sanger was at least a defacto racist.
Even if you can’t prove that she was explicitly racist, she advocated for policies that caused tremendous harm among African-Americans and other minorities in marginalized communities. So all I’m saying is be consistent, people. We need to be consistent. Either show history, warts and all, or cancel everything. My preferred policy is to show history, warts and all. We are mature enough as a civilization to look back at our past to see where things went well.
And to look at people, not as one-sided symbols, but as three-dimensional human beings born in particular time and place to judge the holistic context of their contributions to society. And so when you look at someone like Father Junípero Serra, the holistic contribution to society that he gave especially bringing the gospel here to hundreds of thousands, millions of people here in the West of the United States. That deserves he gets to have a statue.
Margaret Sanger promoting contraceptive mentality, promoting eugenics that ultimately did lead to a culture of death, a culture of abortion. No, she should not be celebrated. So I hope that was helpful to you all. Thanks you all for listening. Stay tuned for more episodes this week and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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