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June 1, 2007
Laura Ingraham - The Eugenics Trap
Today on the Laura Ingraham show, Laura had Linda Chavez as a guest, for the purpose of discussing Ms. Chavez's column Latino Fear and Loathing. I am, of course, not at all a male chauvinist, but the naked anger in the discussion between Laura and Linda is an excellent example of why females terrify the daylights out of me.
The initial part of the exchange dealt with eugenics. Chavez pulls eugenics into the argument via the following paragraph in her article.
Where once the xenophobes could advocate forced sterilization and eugenics coupled with virtually shutting off legal immigration from "undesirable" countries, now they must be content with building walls, putting troops on the border, rounding up illegal aliens on the job and deporting them, passing local ordinances to signal their distaste for immigrants' multi-family living arrangements, and doing whatever else they can to drive these people back where they came from.
This paragraph is factually correct, but its placement in the article seeks to draw the reader into concluding that in fact the people who want a fence on the border are doing so because they can't do forced sterilization any more. The Chavez article does not provide any evidence of the link between opponents of the Kennedy immigration bill and fans of forced sterilization, but in her discussion with Laura she talked about various organizations involved in the fight, and what their founders were doing in the early Twentieth Century.
This is silly. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a big supporter of eugenics, but that does not mean that the modern organization wants to purify the human race. It has been nearly a hundred years, and the political debate has changed a lot since then. In particular, the Republicans are no longer isolationists, the Democrats no longer believe in segregation, and anybody who wants to seize land from the Jews knows they need nuclear weapons to do it.
It is bad enough to turn an intellectual debate into name-calling, but it's even worse when the name-calling is based on a guilt-by-association from the distant past. I say, enough is enough! If we're going to have an argument based purely on emotion and personal attacks, let's do it the right way!
Sloppy application of an illogical technique just makes everybody look bad.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
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