Thanks to Alan Capasso, the Chesterton and Friends blog has posted more this month than it has in quite a while. I suspect part of this is due to a rise in the popularity of eugenics, which Capasso is determined to beat down.

First, he highlighted the project of Barbara Harris, who after adopting a child of drug-addicted parents, started a campaign to pay addicts to get sterilized.

Later, he and a commenter brought up some of the history in state-based initiatives in Wisconsin and North Carolina. A piece of a public service article from North Carolina was very intriguing:

The use of contraceptives has been urged to help bring the birth rates into balance. Yet contraceptives have back-fired on us. Generally speaking, they have been accepted only among the class of persons who represent our best mental stock.

Capasso then references the movie Idiocracy (Warning, clip is NSFW or around children).

I have met quite a few people like the “intelligent” couple. Sadly, it was not much of a caricature, and far too close to real life.

Anyway, there was one more thing that Capasso highlighted for which I am grateful, a quote from G.K. Chesterton:

They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control. We could smash them to atoms, if we could be as indecent in our language as they are immoral in their conclusions.

G.K. Chesterton, the Thing

Ah, now there is a capital idea.

Natural selection is “a natural process resulting in the evolution of organisms best adapted to the environment” according to Princeton. Eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), Barbara Harris, and Louisiana State Rep. John LaBruzzo point to natural selection, and man’s intelligence, to back up their policies and actions.

Natural selection is a documented fact, that is a given (even if some in academia are combining it with a revival of the Dark Ages’ superstition of spontaneous generation to explain the origin of life). The intelligence of man, on the other hand, can be disputed. Particularly in the cases above.

Nature, if we are to ascribe this intelligence to pagan god of academia, may have a different direction than human intelligence tells us. LaBruzzo wanted to sterilize Louisiana women on welfare, but encourage child birth among college-educated parents. Idicracy lampooned a couple with a high IQ. Are these things really indicators of “Nature’s” design or direction, or are we fooling ourselves?

Margaret Sanger died an addict to pain pills. Barbara Harris had to adopt to get a child to raise. Natural selection had denied her a child of her own – perhaps for its own good reasons. (Telling the world the parents of the child you adopted ought to have been unable to reproduce? Talk about a woman being unfit to be a mother!) LaBruzzo, despite his college education, tried to promote a eugenics program that failed in the US in the early 20th Century, failed to gain support in Nazi Germany, and failed to gain support from his legislative predecessor, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

Are these the best of our species? I hardly think so.

It reminds me of line in Fight Club:

I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species.

In the intelligence behind natural selection, one doesn’t have to do that with humans. The undesirables, the mentally feeble, the unintelligent and uneducated are the ones who aren’t reproducing.

Look, natural selection works!