That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

I could have done a point-by-point dissection of Huggy Bear's latest rant, but I think I could cover most of it by pointing out the underlying fallacy that underlies the problem: his assumption that because one major founder of Planned Parenthood had eugenicist views, therefore, the organisation she founded cannot possibly have evolved from that in the hundred plus years it's been around. Indeed, they've recently done what they could to distance themselves from her for her dodgier views because they know they were terrible.

And, even then, Margaret Sanger's views were a bit more complex than the simple "white supremacist eugenicist" narrative Huggy Bear's pushing. For one thing, one of the last things she did before she died was set up an award named after herself, and its first recipient? Martin Luther Fucking King Junior. I think you mentioned one of his nieces and expected us to infer his beliefs from that, but here's something straight from the horse's mouth. Admittedly, he didn't deliver it in person, since he was in another state (apparently, he was doing critical work on the Chicago Open Housing Movement), but he sent his wife Coretta.

And, even before that, even before the Negro Project, when she opened her first birth control clinic in Harlem, she had the support of leaders in the black community. Including W.E.B. DuBois. And, yes, he even worked on the Negro Project. And this little op/ed from him might shed some light into why so many Planned Parenthood clinics are in Black neighbourhoods (spoiler: it's because neighbourhoods that are majority black also tend to have high amounts of poverty. Also, since Planned Parenthood doesn't have a monopoly on abortions, other clinics can pick up the slack in the richer neighbourhoods.)


And, even then, a proper eugenicist program with Planned Parenthood's ideals couldn't really work. It emphasises a woman's choice to bear children or not, and since a proper eugenicist view requires a lot of buy-in, as well as a lot of coercion into forcing those who didn't buy in to remove themselves from the gene pool, it's clear these are not really two pieces that go together.