In its quest to pander to the lowest of the low, this morning FOX & Friends First took its viewers back to the 1920s as it gave national air time to a South Carolina politician who has proposed that "bad" parents with a history of raising "bad" kids should be subjected to mandatory sterilization for "the benefit of society". I kid you not! Larry Shirley, a City Councilman in Charleston, SC, got three minutes of valuable national airtime this morning to propose an idea that he himself admitted has been struck down by the Supreme Court in past years. Maybe Councilman Shirley, who's white, thinks that the two new conservative Supreme Court Justices - Alito and Roberts - will overturn past precedents and bring back the Golden Age of the White Race? By the end of the segment I was so furious I almost threw a stapler at the TV screen.
The F&FF co-hosts were Tiki Barber, who's African-American, and Kiran Chetry, whose family originated in India. Both hosts acted as though this was just another interview with just another guest talking about just another subject.
It was mind-boggling.
During the interview, FOX News scrolled a mini-history of the sterilization issue on its lower screen, as follows.
S. C. OFFICIAL: BAD PARENTS SHOULD BE STERILIZED
1907: IN BECOMES 1ST STATE TO ENACT STERILIZATION LAW
AT LEAST 30 STATES WOULD FOLLOW SUIT
BY THE MID-1920S, MORE THAN 3,000 WERE FORCIBLY STERILIZED
MOST WERE INSTITUTIONALIZED, MENTALLY RETARDED OR DISABLED
ALSO STERILIZED WERE THOSE WHO SCORED POORLY ON IQ TESTS
PROPONENTS WANTED TO END REPRODUCTION BY THE 'FEEBLE-MINDED'
1924: VA TEENAGER IS FIRST TO BE STERILIZED UNDER VA LAW
All very sanitized, neatly tied up with a bow. What FOX News deliberately left out was that enforced sterilization was part of a broader "social engineering" program known ans Eugenics, a flawed scientific theory funded by large corpporations devoted to the idea of creating a master race comprised of white, nordic super men and women. Eugenics was practiced across the United States for many years and was racially motivated.
In the Introduction to his book The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, author Edwin Black wrote the following:
The goal was to immediately sterilize fourteen million people in the United States and millions more worldwide-the "lower tenth"-and then continuously eradicate the remaining lowest tenth until only a pure Nordic super race remained. Ultimately, some 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized and the total is probably much higher. No one knows how many marriages were thwarted by state felony statutes. Although much of the persecution was simply racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, eugenics wore the mantle of respectable science to mask its true character.
The victims of eugenics were poor urban dwellers and rural "white trash" from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified. Eugenics contaminated many otherwise worthy social, medical and educational causes from the birth control movement to the development of psychology to urban sanitation. Psychologists persecuted their patients. Teachers stigmatized their students. Charitable associations clamored to send those in need of help to lethal chambers they hoped would be constructed. Immigration assistance bureaus connived to send the most needy to sterilization mills. Leaders of the ophthalmology profession conducted a long and chilling political campaign to round up and coercively sterilize every relative of every American with a vision problem. All of this churned throughout America years before the Third Reich rose in Germany.
Eugenics targeted all mankind, so of course its scope was global. American eugenic evangelists spawned similar movements and practices throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. Forced sterilization laws and regimens took root on every continent. Each local American eugenic ordinance or statute-from Virginia to Oregon-was promoted internationally as yet another precedent to be emulated by the international movement. A tightly-knit network of mainstream medical and eugenical journals, international meetings and conferences kept the generals and soldiers of eugenics up to date and armed for their nation's next legislative opportunity.
Eventually, America's eugenic movement spread to Germany as well, where it caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. Under Hitler, eugenics careened beyond any American eugenicist's dream. National Socialism transduced America's quest for a "superior Nordic race" into Hitler's drive for an "Aryan master race." The Nazis were fond of saying "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology," and in 1934 the Richmond Times-Dispatch quoted a prominent American eugenicist as saying, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."
(For a list of books on this subject go to Amazon.com).
When Kiran Chetry first teased the sterilization story at 6:48 EM ET, FOX viewers were treated to an image of an attractive young ethnic woman, reading to her two children, clearly sending the subtle subliminal message that even kind, caring mothers - if they were non-white - could be sterilized. The effect was downright creepy, so much so that at the very end of the clip, Brian Kilmeade, the third co-host, made the remark that "these are good parents". However, I did not register his comment the first three times I viewed my tape, which tells me that very few FOX viewers heard it either. They would have been left with the visual images of that "ethnic" mother reading to her two children.
Councilman Larry Shirley was oh-so-nice-and-reasonable as he discussed his ideas, fully acknowledging that similar ideas have been struck down in the past. To the FOX News hosts he said "All I wanted to do was start a dialogue. Unfortunately, I didn't want it to go nationwide but the good part about this nationwide dialogue is the emails that I have received have been from all walks of life, all types of people, and I've been encouraged by people that know that we've got a problem and that problem is parenting. And that is something we have to address."
However, according to the Alabama Times-Daily, Mr. Shirley has also been quoted as saying:
"We pick up stray animals and spay them. These mothers need to be spayed if they can't take care of theirs. Once they have a child and it's running the street, to let them continue to have children is totally unacceptable."
If you are as upset as I am by Mr. Shirley's old-timey ideas on parenting, why not contact FOX News and the FOX & Friends hosts and let them know how you feel.
FOX News: comments at foxnews.com
FOX & Friends: friends at foxnews.com