There's no eugenicist like an old eugenicist.
In a jaw-droppingly blunt 1957 television interview conducted by Mike Wallace, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger shows that she was still the same woman who, in 1932, urged Congress to set up a Parliament of Population "to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization."
The interview is available online in its entirety, as is a transcript. Wallace does an admirable job confronting Sanger with her own pronouncements, including her having told his own researcher that " it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control—even among its own members." Not for nothing is she Barack Obama's heroine.
Watch the interview and learn the foundation of the philosophy that underlies Planned Parenthood to this day:
WALLACE: What are your religious beliefs, Mrs. Sanger? Do you believe in God in the sense of a Divine Being -- who rewards or punishes people after death?Thanks to Kathy Schmugge for the tip.
SANGER: Well, I have a different attitude about--the divine--I feel that we have divinity within us, and the more we express the good part of our lives, the more the divine within us expresses itself.I suppose I would call myself an Episcopalian by religion and there's a--many other, if you travel around the world you get quite a bit of the feeling of all--all religions--have so much alike in the divine part of our own being. And I suppose you just couldn't just put that into a book or you couldn't put it to a phrase or a sentence.
WALLACE: Do you believe in sin -- When I say believe I don't mean believe in committing sin do you believe there is such a thing as a sin?
SANGER: I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world--that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit..
WALLACE: But sin in the ordinary sense that we regard it -- do you believe or do you not believe.
SANGER: What-what would they be?
WALLACE: Do you believe infidelity is a sin?
SANGER: Well, I'm not going to specify what I think is a sin. I stated what I think is the worst sin.
WALLACE: Yes, but then you asked me to say what--and I said what and ah--you refuse to answer me?
SANGER: I don't know about infidelity, that has many personalities to it--and what a person's own belief is--you can't, I couldn't generalize on any of those things as being sins.
WALLACE: Murder is a sin...
SANGER: Well, I naturally think murder, whether it's a sin or not, is a terrible act.
