Showing posts with label eugenics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eugenics. Show all posts

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Lead us not into temptation. . . .


If you want to stop abortion, mind the company you keep.

If you believe homicide in utero is an abomination, a deadly affront to the rights and dignity of the most powerless and vulnerable members of the human race, don't fall in goose-stepping formation behind a man who sees our society as a tug of war between producers and parasites.

Don't take seriously the "faith-based" entreaties of a popinjay provocateur who once proposed voluntary sterilization of welfare recipients to prevent "a small minority of people working to fund and finance everybody else who isn’t working or producing."

And if you value the dignity of human life, live in Louisiana and come upon a "pro-life" rally with state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, at its head touting his bill to outlaw abortion . . . quickly walk the other way. No,
run the other way.

MEANTIME, even though I'm safely in Nebraska, I really need to stop looking at the hometown rag, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate, online:

Supporters of LaBruzzo’s bill moved to a terrace garden outside the House side of the State Capitol. Opponents of his measure, many wearing pink, followed.

LaBruzzo climbed atop a planter with Rebecca Kiessling, a lawyer he identified as the person who handled the rewriting of the legislation, to address the crowd of about 50 people.

“This is going on across the country,” said Kiessling, of suburban Detroit.

She is with Personhood USA, a Colorado-based group pushing anti-abortion legislation on the state level.

Kiessling said the U.S. Supreme Court likely will not soon overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that allows abortions. “Let’s recognize the unborn child as a person in a full legal sense,” she said.

LaBruzzo said he welcomed a predicted challenge in court if the legislation is approved by both chambers and signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Laura Mullen, of Baton Rouge, was one of several HB587 opponents who took LaBruzzo up on his offer to discuss the issues. When asked about medical implications of banning abortion, LaBruzzo interrupted questioner by saying he was directed by his religious beliefs.

“You’re not discussing it all,” shouted Brett Chance, of Baton Rouge, another opponent.

IF LOUISIANA pro-lifers are "directed" by their religious beliefs, as LaBruzzo claims he is, they have to understand there is a fundamental religious principle they can't escape. One the inheritor of David Duke's House seat can't rewrite like some legislative bill.

It's not complicated, and it goes like this: Satan can't destroy himself. You can't devote your political or philosophical life to evildoing and think you're going to do away with evil. You can't spend your legislative career denying the worth and dignity of "the least of these" -- pushing ill-conceived bill after ill-conceived bill designed to brand some human beings as parasites and deal with them accordingly -- then set your eugenicist self up as some grand defender of human life.

It's like entrusting Satan with the keys to the Kingdom; it would not end well.

Don't believe me, ask Jesus (Mark, Chapter 3):

22
The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebul," 10 and "By the prince of demons he drives out demons."
23
Summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables, "How can Satan drive out Satan?
24
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
25
And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
26
And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand; that is the end of him.
27
But no one can enter a strong man's house to plunder his property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house."
IF YOU'RE in Louisiana, and you're pro-life -- or even if you're a national pro-life figure and get a call from some piss-ant bayou pol you've likely never heard of before -- listen to me now. It's important.

John LaBruzzo is the devil. And if you hang out with him, Satan is going to plunder your house.


You have been warned.

Monday, March 30, 2009

OK, fair is fair


I interrupt my permanent fast from fretting about Louisiana for this important announcement.

Der pissen-anten Führer im der Swampen ist atten it again.

State Rep. John LaBruzzo, National Socialist R-Metairie, wants to require all welfare applicants to undergo drug testing and ban anyone with a felony drug conviction from receiving state aid for 10 years.

State law now bans drug felons from obtaining public assistance for one year from the date of conviction. LaBruzzo's bill would expand that to 10 years; however, a drug felon who goes through a drug treatment program approved by the Department of Social Services could become eligible for assistance two years after completing the program.

As for drug testing, current law calls for drug testing of "certain" adult recipients of aid through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program but leaves it to the state Department of Social Services to determine which recipients will be tested. LaBruzzo's bill would require testing for all adult TANF recipients.

Although less controversial than the sterilization proposal, which drew no public support from any other lawmaker last year, the drug testing and welfare eligibility proposals will face opposition.

"That is a suspicionless, warrantless search," Marjorie Esman, Louisiana director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said of the drug testing proposal. "It's a presumption that someone who needs a little bit of financial assistance has done something wrong."
IN ONE RESPECT, I have little to say about LaBruzzo's proposed legislation apart from "Consider the source." Really, really consider the source.

Consider that folks who had problems with LaBruzzo's eugenic scheme have little problem -- other than the bureaucratic requirements, perhaps -- with der Führer von Metairie pushing something just a little less draconian.

Consider also that most Louisianians probably think making poor people pee in a bottle before getting their welfare check is a fine idea. That cutting off drug felons for a decade is a better idea.

But then consider how these self-same folk might react if Rep. B. Lack Ascoal proposed banning from public assistance for 10 long years anyone convicted of minor in possession or driving under the influence. What about making grandma pass the piss test to collect her Social Security? Or grandpa blow into the Breathalyzer before the doctor submits his bill to Medicare?

Oh, no. They're not those people.

NO, TELL ME. Who are "those people," pray tell?

Well, that's my one reaction. My other reaction is to ask whether we get to apply similar high standards to the state of Louisiana before allowing it to continue suckling at the federal teat.

Think of the money we could save.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Way to go, Louisiana!




Dear Louisiana,

I assume not everyone in my home state is a Nazi or a racist . . . or even an ignorant knothead.

On the other hand, though, Louisianians have an unfortunate propensity for tolerating crumbling schools, dysfunctional cities, crooked politicians and crypto-Nazis in high office. Judging from crap like this, a lot of God Bless Amerika conservatives down there are more dismayed by me calling "Nazi" on a pol who wants to eliminate the poor by eliminating the poor than they are by one of their own trodding the same path as Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler.

Anything to save the sainted taxpayer a buck, eh? That's where Hitler got his start, too. Kill and sterilize the "defectives," ease the burden on der volk. Then move up to killing out-of-favor ethnic groups -- because they're a blight, too.

Well, given that Louisiana has been judged guilty of "generational welfare," generational stupidity, generational corruption and generational half-assedness, why shouldn't the rest of America deal with the Gret Stet just as some in the Gret Stet would deal with the poor?

I mean, look. All we need to do is turn on the television to collect sufficient information for a quick verdict.

And we don't need no stinkin' tubal ligations to carry out our sentence . . . which would be your vanishing act. We can just cut off the federal tax dollars -- there go those outraged taxpayers again -- and let the Gulf of Mexico (and the storms that roll ashore off of it) do the rest.

After all, since eradication is what you'd like to do unto others, you must be OK with that being done to you. Right?

You can discuss among yourselves.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

If it quacks like a Duke. . . .

I have been informed that I am a leftist, making the "usual comparisons of Republicans to Nazi Fascists" with my post about the Louisiana state representative hell-bent on following in the jackbooted footsteps of a previous holder of his House seat -- former Louisiana Nazi and Klan leader David Duke.

MY CRITIQUE may or may not be "leftist," but one thing I do know: If Rep. John LaBruzzo walks like a Duke, flies like a Duke, swims like a Duke, quacks like a Duke and wants to sterilize poor Louisianians like a Duke . . . he just might be a Nazi. Just like David Duke.

John LaBruzzo thinks too many poor people are dragging down the Gret Stet by clinging to the public dole. Adolf Hitler thought Germany had a problem with too many Jews, Gypsies and mental defectives burdening the state and dragging down the gene pool.

The only difference between the two -- and their prescriptions for dealing with some humans they see as less human than those who are Aryan enough and well-off enough -- lies in imagination . . . and what one can get away with.

Chad Rogers at The Dead Pelican thinks -- somehow -- that the dishonorable member from Stupid City isn't a Nazi at all, but instead has more in common with the Red Chinese:

The leftist comparison of La Bruzzo's eugenics plan to the Nazi Germany of the 1930s is a way of ignoring the real problem. For this business of government controlled reproduction is more reminiscent of present- day Communist China.

Like communist China, the state and local government has bestowed upon itself the role of caregiver. Thanks to the welfare system, New Orleans has an environment that discourages self-reliance, exacerbates poverty, and encourages dependence on the government dole.

No system like that can financially sustain itself. It now has more people than it can afford. As with Communist China, an environment of dependency has been created that is financially unsustainable.

And now, as with China, politicians are playing God to solve the problems created by politicians.

The left's cries of Nazism in NOLA ring hollow for another reason- La Bruzzo's arguments for sterilization mirror those of left on the issue of tax payer funded abortion. That is, pro-lifers are often criticized for wanting to force women to have children that they can't take care of. In short, they argue that abortion is a means of population control.

THERE'S ONE BIG PROBLEM with that critique: The analogy doesn't hold up.

The Chinese regime may be butchers and draconian population controllers, but they're not discriminatory butchers and draconian population controllers. If you're poor, you only can have one kid. If you're well-off -- at least theoretically -- you only can have that one kid.

If you're Han Chinese, you get one kid. If you're Zhuang, you get one kid. Manchu? One kid. Mongol? Same raw deal.

The Chinese communists are population controllers, and ruthless ones at that. They, however, are not eugenicists. They leave that nasty business to the likes of Adolf Hitler, Margaret Sanger . . . and John LaBruzzo.

If the jackboot fits. . . .

See, LaBruzzo doesn't want everybody to get their tubes tied or pee pees snipped. He just wants the "burdensome" to do that. He was concerned by the tremendous burden he saw the state of Louisiana shouldering as it evacuated, sheltered and provided for thousands and thousands of New Orleanians threatened by Hurricane Gustav.

Here's a picture of Louisiana's Burden:


WHAT DER FÜHRER from Metairie isn't concerned about -- at least concerned enough to propose one Final Solution or another -- is the even greater burden the aging Baby Boom generation is going to start posing for Louisiana taxpayers in a decade or so.

Fine, upstandin', hard-workin' constituents of der Führer are going to have to find a way to pay for all those state services (and pensions) Boomers are going to start sucking down like Otis Campbell with a jug of white lightnin'. Trouble is, my generation got its tubes tied, prescriptions filled and pee-pees snipped in alarming numbers, leaving fewer future taxpayers than otherwise could have been expected.

And worse than that, Boomers' offspring are hauling ass out of the Gret Stet at an even more alarming rate than they did.

Vascectomies and tubal ligations are no viable solution for burgeoning hordes of old people. As a 47-year-old, I tremble to think of what solution LaBruzzo might goose-step his way into for that one -- that is, if culling the burdensome poor doesn't provide enough taxpayer relief.

From the
New Orleans City Business article on LaBruzzo's eugenic scheme:

"If both the welfare and Social Security system keep growing, one day we're going to have a small minority of people working to fund and finance everybody else who isn’t working or producing," LaBruzzo said. "Our kids, who will be working, will be the minority and any vote of theirs will be canceled out. If your livelihood is based on government handouts, why would you ever vote for somebody who is going to lower taxes? They never would. So once we reach that breaking point there's no return."

TALK LIKE THAT sounds familiar. Perhaps like this 1922 passage by Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood?

Our 'overhead' expense in segregating the delinquent, the defective and the dependent, in prisons, asylums and permanent homes, our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying ... demonstrate our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism. No industrial corporation could maintain its existence upon such a foundation. Yet hardheaded 'captains of industry,' financiers who pride themselves upon their cool-headed and keen-sighted business ability are dropping millions into rosewater philanthropies and charities that are silly at best and vicious at worst. In our dealings with such elements there is a bland maladministration and misuse of huge sums that should in all righteousness be used for the development and education of the healthy elements of the community.

OR MAYBE THIS from Sanger's 1938 autobiography:

I accepted one branch of this philosophy, but eugenics without birth control seemed to me a house built upon sands. It could not stand against the furious winds of economic pressure which had buffeted into partial or total helplessness a tremendous proportion of the human race. The eugenists wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from less children for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back of that and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.

HERE'S WHAT La Bruzzo is. He's a throwback to a bygone age Americans don't much like to acknowledge anymore, as outlined in The Guardian, with this extract from Edwin Black's War Against the Weak:

The film was called The Black Stork. Written by Jack Lait, a reporter on the Chicago American, it was produced in Hollywood and given a massive national distribution and promotion campaign. Haiselden played himself in a fictionalised account of a eugenically mismatched couple whom he advises not to have children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually, the woman does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die. The dead child levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ. It was unbridled cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement; the film played at movie theatres around the country for more than a decade.

National publicity advertised it as a "eugenic love story". One advertisement quoted Swiss eugenicist Auguste Forel's warning: "The law of heredity winds like a red thread through the family history of every criminal, of every epileptic, eccentric and insane person. Shall we sit still ... without applying the remedy?" In 1917, a display advertisement for The Black Stork read: "Kill Defectives, Save the Nation and See 'The Black Stork'." Various methods of eugenic euthanasia - including gassing the unwanted in lethal chambers - were a part of everyday American parlance and ethical debate some two decades before Nevada approved the first such chamber for criminal executions in 1921.

As America's eugenics movement gathered pace, it inspired a host of imitators. In France, Belgium, Sweden, England and elsewhere in Europe, cliques of eugenicists did their best to introduce eugenic principles into national life; they could always point to recent precedents established in the United States.


(snip)

As America's elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as "bacteria," "vermin," "mongrels" and "subhuman", a superior race of Nordics was increasingly seen as the answer to the globe's eugenic problems. US laws, eugenic investigations and ideology became blueprints for Germany's rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers.

One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action. While there, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American ethnological stalwarts. And he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its "corruption" by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail.

In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote: "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilisation of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race."

One day in the early 1930s, Whitney visited Grant to show off a letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race. The fan letter called Grant's book "his Bible". The man who sent those letters was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler displayed his knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. In Mein Kampf, for example, he declared: "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole."

Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State."

Hitler proudly told his comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. "Now that we know the laws of heredity," he told a fellow Nazi, "it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Nor did Hitler fail to grasp the eugenic potential of gas and the lethal chamber, a topic that was already being discussed in German eugenic circles before Mein Kampf was published. Hitler, who had himself been hospitalised for battlefield gas injuries, wrote: "If at the beginning of the war and during the war 12,000 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our best German workers in the field, the sacrifices of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: 12,000 scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future."

THE HOLOCAUST was Margaret Sanger's -- and all the rest of the American eugenicists' -- theories and practices carried to their logical conclusion. Almost a century since hate was refined into a science, LaBruzzo has bought into that line of thinking wholeheartedly -- and hard-heartedly.

And now, with Louisiana taxpayers' money, he proposes to carry that agenda out to an extent that makes even likely Planned Parenthood sympathizers squeamish.

No, what the race-purifier from Metairie proposes isn't new, and it most certainly can't be blamed on Mao Zedong. And while the Nazis drank deeply from the same poisoned well as LaBruzzo, sterilizing the poor, the black and the "defective" really isn't Nazi, either -- though they certainly perfected the deadly artform.

What the latest menace from Metairie proposes is as American as apple pie. And Jim Crow. And miscegenation laws.

Louisianians had better beware embracing little GOP Nazis like John LaBruzzo, because the rest of America is well into the process of doing to Louisiana what LaBruzzo (and those who support him) would do to "the nigras." Among these United States, Louisiana is exactly what many Americans figure they have too much of, and would like to make go away.

And if folks all across the Gret Stet would rather not embrace the concept of "brother's keeper," that non-embrace is what they're going to get . . . "good and hard,"
in the words of H.L. Mencken.

From the city that gave us David Duke. . . .



From the R21 video Hall of Shame. Maybe
some Metairie, La., voters in there somewhere?

If you live in Louisiana, it might be worth considering any economic crisis that benighted state is headed for might be due less to too many people "depending on government" than voters depending on half-assed Hitlers like John LaBruzzo to run that government.

New Orleans City Business says the state House member from Metairie -- the New Orleans suburb that gave America
David Duke -- wants to pay the poor to get sterilized:
State Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, fears Louisiana may be headed toward an economic crisis if the percentage of people dependent on the government is not decreased.

His solution: pay impoverished women $1,000 to have their tubes tied so they will stop having babies they can’t afford.

The idea came to LaBruzzo after hurricanes Katrina and Gustav when the state was forced to evacuate, shelter and care for tens of thousands of people.

"I realized that all these people were in Louisiana's care and what a massive financial responsibility that is to the state," LaBruzzo said. "I said, 'I wonder if it might be a good idea to pay some of these people to get sterilized.'"

I GUESS we can be grateful Louisiana state government -- never known for its efficiency or for attracting the best and brightest -- only seems to be capable, at present, of producing half-assed Hitlers. Lord help us all if LaBruzzo suddenly were to develop the brains of a Philadelphia lawyer and employ the efficiencies of German eugenicists.

Like Adolf Hitler, for one.

Der Führer never would have wasted a single Reichsmark on tying the tubes of a single Jewish woman when he could gas hundreds at a time for a fraction of the cost. LaBruzzo may be evil, but nobody ever accused him of being Hitler smart:

LaBruzzo said he is researching the issue, and if he finds that the number of people on welfare has increased on a dramatic and continuous basis over the past several decades, he may introduce a bill during the next legislative session promoting voluntary sterilization in exchange for monetary compensation.

"If both the welfare and Social Security system keep growing, one day we're going to have a small minority of people working to fund and finance everybody else who isn’t working or producing," LaBruzzo said. "Our kids, who will be working, will be the minority and any vote of theirs will be canceled out. If your livelihood is based on government handouts, why would you ever vote for somebody who is going to lower taxes? They never would. So once we reach that breaking point there's no return."

Reaction to LaBruzzo's proposal has been swift. It has been called racist and reminiscent of the genocidal policies of the Nazis.

Shana Griffin, interim director of the New Orleans Women's Health Clinic, described it as a modern day version of eugenics, a theory that promotes improving humanity’s future by decreasing the number of babies produced by people who are seen as physically, socially or mentally deficient.

It is obvious who LaBruzzo is targeting with this legislation by mentioning welfare recipients and those dependent on city-assisted evacuation — poor, black women, Griffin said.
WHAT IS IT with Metairie, anyway? First Duke, now this clown?

Obviously, it would be extremely hypocritical (not to mention evil) of me to advocate the sterilization of the city's voters. Perhaps, though, it wouldn't be out of line to require Metairie residents -- and only Metairie residents -- to pass literacy and civics tests before they can register to vote.


I think that might be a game plan. See, you're not actually trying to wipe out a whole class of obvious social and mental deficients, exactly.

No, you'd just be trying to minimize the damage coming out of Stupid City. Yeah, that's the ticket.