Story Must Be Told, Pt. 14: Four More Creepy Progressives

Last week, I shined a light on four very high-profile (and highly regarded, to this day) progressives who have made their sad mark on society.

Here are four more:

Margaret Sanger – was an American birth control activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). In her 1914 newsletter, The Woman Rebel, Sanger says: “I believe woman was enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing….” etc., etc. She was also a proponent of negative eugenics, a social philosophy which claims that human hereditary traits can be improved through social intervention.

Methods of social intervention (targeted at those seen as “genetically unfit”) have included selective breeding, sterilization and euthanasia. In “A Plan for Peace” (1932), for example, Sanger proposed a congressional department to: “Keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.”

Insert your own joke here __________.

Sanger also believed that aboriginal Australians were “the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development.” And she praised the attempted assassination of John D. Rockefeller in 1914. The bomb intended for Rockefeller exploded prematurely, killing three assassins. A fourth person, Marie Chavez, who had not been involved in the conspiracy, but merely rented a room in the adjacent apartment, was also killed.

Nice lady, that Ms. Sanger.

Alfred Kinsey – The Kinsey Reports hit post WWII America (in 1948) like a sucker punch, and his “research” has done more to alter and confuse sexual perceptions in America than any other person’s. It also sparked the sexual revolution. As you might expect, by now, his unscientific and biased conclusions (Kinsey was trained as a Zoologist) came primarily as a result of faulty and fraudulent methods.

Kinsey, as we now know, “was a sometimes homosexual, a wife-swapper, a sadomasochist, and some suspect, a pedophile ….The real Kinsey lent his wife to other men and turned his attic into his own personal pornographic movie studio. His fellow researchers … also acted as his sex partners. One Kinsey researcher bragged about bedding a dog. Others were committed sadomasochists. The common denominator among staff at [Kinsey’s] Institute of Sex Research (still in business) was a pursuit of sex that was outside of societal conventions.” (Intellectual Morons, How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas, Daniel Flynn).

Therefore, the result of his work was that many Americans would now begin to view their neighbors with great suspicion, fearing that they might be involved in a variety of “deviant” behaviors, even though the overriding truth was that they were not.

To arrive at his skewed results, Kinsey interviewed primarily felons, sex offenders, inmates in jail, prostitutes (both male and female), unmarrieds, child molesters, etc. And in his conversations with child molesters he argued that most of the children involved actually derived “definite pleasure” from the experience. That Kinsey would allow child molesters to dictate whether these children enjoyed being molested speaks volumes not only about his character, but about his lack of devotion to any kind of real science. Kinsey concluded that a child was harmed more by the “hysteria” created by police, parents and others than by any damage caused by the rapist involved. And of course, rather than report these activities to police, Kinsey went on interviewing child molesters and rapists throughout much of his career.

Kinsey also enjoyed, it must be pointed out, strange activities like tying a rope around his testicles, standing on a chair while the other end was tied off to the ceiling, and jumping off. Ouch. And because of the fact that he lost the ability to feel normal sexual sensations, he circumcised himself with a pocket knife in the hopes of improving the “situation.” Bet’cha don’t find that in Wikipedia.

Again, only close supporters and confidants of Kinsey’s research are allowed access to his original papers and diaries. Are you surprised? Kinsey’s research still stands as the basis for most modern sex education, which makes me sleep better at night.

Paul Ehrlich – You might call Prof. Ehrlich the “Man who cried wolf” – once too often – get it? Ehrlich has made a living as a doomsayer since the late 60’s, first with his book The Population Bomb, (in which he predicted that “In the 1970’s and 1980’s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now”) and later with any number of publications and predictions – NONE OF WHICH HAVE EVER COME TRUE! Yet, the Left continues to embrace the good professor as if he’s discovered the cure for cancer. And his doomsday predictions have kept the money flowing into his shop, year after year. By the way, Ehrlich‘s only scientific training is in entomology, specializing in the study of butterflies, which is fitting.

Peter Singer – It has to be said up front, that Princeton Professor, Peter Singer objects to humans eating animals but not to humans having sex with them. So? Singer, the intellectual godfather of the animal-rights movement, also supports infanticide (the killing of babies) and euthanasia (the killing of anybody else). Singer has stated, “When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed.”

What a guy. Would that have applied when he was born?

Next week: I begin to wrap up this series, and will talk about where we might go from here.

Image: Margaret Sanger; source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-29808; author: Underwood & Underwood; public domain