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Ala. honors Helen Keller, ignores leftist views
starnewsonline ^ | May 17, 2005 | starnewsonline

Posted on 05/17/2005 8:41:55 AM PDT by Dubya

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To: KidGlock

How did Helen Keller burn her fingers?

Trying to read the waffle iron.


41 posted on 05/17/2005 10:27:46 AM PDT by Tokra (I think I'll retire to Bedlam.)
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To: Dubya
Father of deaf daughter here. I never knew this about her....just the storybook stuff. Thanks for posting.

BTW, some of you have no class when it comes to humor. Very disappointing.

Some jokes are ok, some are over the line.

42 posted on 05/17/2005 10:34:01 AM PDT by wallcrawlr (http://www.bionicear.com)
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To: sittnick
It was all about eugenics in the early days.

In the earlier days, it was all about women's rights, as she rode with the sufferage movement to push her birth control agenda. She needed something else to hitch her contraception agenda onto after that movement died due to its victory, and she chose eugenics. After that died, she tried other things, like lobbying and getting contraception accepted as medicinal rather than as an obscenity. Pretty good at PR I think, hitching your issue onto whatever is popular.

BTW, PP didn't even start doing abortions until 1970, four years after Sanger's death, at a time when abortion was still illegal. Don't get me wrong, I believe that organization is completely corrupt and now exists as an abortion money-making machine. But back to the subject, the ideas that Helen Keller probably supported were those of women being educated and having power over their lives.

43 posted on 05/17/2005 10:40:59 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: wideawake
the evils of artificial birth control

Don't most Protestant denominations allow artificial birth control?

44 posted on 05/17/2005 10:42:04 AM PDT by BlackRazor
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To: wideawake
This notion that women were unable to control their own persons in the days when chastity was lauded and encouraged is preposterous.

Chastity within a marriage? If you're the "no sex unless for reproduction" type, that's fine for you. But most of the rest of the country wants women to be able to say "No, I want to stop at five kids." Back then a women didn't have that power.

45 posted on 05/17/2005 10:44:47 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: antiRepublicrat
Chastity within a marriage?

Apparently you are unclear on the meaning of the word "chastity."

If you're the "no sex unless for reproduction" type, that's fine for you.

Your caricature of my position is typical.

But most of the rest of the country wants women to be able to say "No, I want to stop at five kids."

I understand that much of the culture has internalized this pathological fear of the large family.

Back then a women didn't have that power.

Of course they did. Are you arguing that every marriage before the 1960s produced more than 5 children?

46 posted on 05/17/2005 10:51:28 AM PDT by wideawake (God bless our brave soldiers and their Commander in Chief)
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To: antiRepublicrat; BlackElk
She needed something else to hitch her contraception agenda onto after that movement died due to its victory

The birth control movement was not victorious in the 1920's. You would really have to go all the way up to 1964 (Griswold v. Connecticut) or at least the birth-control pill (1950's) to claim that. Everything that she has written shows the eugenics and the birth control tied closely together. I have no opinionof Helen Keller, but Sanger was pro abortion from the beginning. She was also for RERQUIRING $500 (quite a sum in those days) for a birthing license before children would be allowed. That is not exactly what I would call pro-women's rights. If anything she used the banner of women's rights to promote eugenics, and not the other way around.

Where have you picked up your information on Sanger? I actually possess some of the early books under her name, and the woman you describe does not resemble the one whose writings I have read.
47 posted on 05/17/2005 10:55:31 AM PDT by sittnick (There's no salvation in politics.)
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To: BlackRazor; BlackElk
the evils of artificial birth control

Don't most Protestant denominations allow artificial birth control?


These days, yes, but virtually none did until after the Anglican Lambeth conference in 1927 or so.
48 posted on 05/17/2005 10:57:49 AM PDT by sittnick (There's no salvation in politics.)
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To: sittnick
The birth control movement was not victorious in the 1920's.

I didn't say it was. I said the suffrage movement was. They were happy to get her support when they had a goal, but after that they abandoned her because they disliked birth control for a variety of reasons.

If anything she used the banner of women's rights to promote eugenics, and not the other way around.

I never saw anything from her about eugenics until after the eugenics movement got popular.

Where have you picked up your information on Sanger?

Various places, including pro-life sources, but never PP.

49 posted on 05/17/2005 11:06:18 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: wideawake
Apparently you are unclear on the meaning of the word "chastity."

Which one? Two out of the three definitions sound strangely out of place in a marriage: virginity and abstinence. The other is just generally being virtuous, and doesn't apply to the subject.

Your caricature of my position is typical.

That's the position you appeared to promote.

I understand that much of the culture has internalized this pathological fear of the large family.

Or maybe it's that in an industrialized society like ours it can be difficult to properly support so many children, especially among the poor, like those Sanger worked with. BTW, I have four and probably more coming.

Of course they did. Are you arguing that every marriage before the 1960s produced more than 5 children?

The did? How? They had sex whenever the husband wanted, and got pregnant whenever the timing happened to be right. No, not all produced so many children. Some are less fertile, and many had miscarriages and stillbirths.

50 posted on 05/17/2005 11:13:19 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: dangus

.** But she was Christian.**

She was a follower of Emanual Swedenborg, founder of the Swedenborganism religion.


51 posted on 05/17/2005 11:15:36 AM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar
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To: Dubya
Her views started going downhill after she played herself and her cousin on that 60s TV show...

What?

Oh...nevermind...

52 posted on 05/17/2005 11:16:56 AM PDT by Corin Stormhands (http://www.cafepress.com/wardsmythe)
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To: antiRepublicrat
Yet she threw her support behind Margaret Sanger, who believed that women like Helen keller should never have been born.

Since Helen became blind and deaf due to an illness after she was born, Helen's mother would have to have been psychic to consider aborting her.

53 posted on 05/17/2005 11:20:20 AM PDT by OrangeDaisy
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To: wideawake

**Margaret Sanger was in the business of preventing and murdering children, especially the dark and disabled ones, from the get-go.**

You mean those eastern and southern European "low brows" such as Jews, Italians,and Huns?
I have a book on the Johnstown flood printed a year after the disaster. There is a large ammount of it about those evil eastern Europeans robbing the dead in that disaster.


54 posted on 05/17/2005 11:20:25 AM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar
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To: OrangeDaisy; Dubya
Since Helen became blind and deaf due to an illness after she was born, Helen's mother would have to have been psychic to consider aborting her.

LOL! I didn't catch that.

55 posted on 05/17/2005 11:35:57 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: KidGlock; Hillarys Gate Cult
Q. What did Helen Keller say when she was falling down the stairs?

A. (imagine me gyrating back and forth frantically doing sign language)

Q: What did Helen Keller do when she fell in the well?

A: She screamed her hands off.

Although Helen Keller was blind and deaf, she could talk. She even gave speeches. Someone I knew well attended one of her speeches and heard her talk.

56 posted on 05/17/2005 11:40:19 AM PDT by wideminded
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To: Ruy Dias de Bivar
She was a follower of Emanual Swedenborg, founder of the Swedenborganism religion.

Not exactly founder. He was a gifted scientist, later turned theologian, with some interesting ideas, but those ideas didn't take off as a religion until well after his death.

57 posted on 05/17/2005 11:44:10 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: wideminded

Your statements may be correct.

But they would make lousy jokes.

: )


58 posted on 05/17/2005 1:17:23 PM PDT by KidGlock (Get in the pit and try to love some one)
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To: antiRepublicrat; sittnick; ninenot
AntiRepublicrat:

If you really want to clear up the controversy as to Sanger, read Sanger's books (like Pivot of Civilization) and those of her close associate in the American Birth Control League Lothrop Stoddard who wrote "The Rising Tide of Color" in the WWI era. Stoddard's book has chapters including The White Man's World, the Black man's World, The Brown Man's World, the Red Man's World, the Yellow Man's World. I believe that the introduction was written by Madison Grant, a pal of both of them and quite a notorioso in his own right. The thesis was that outside of "The White Man's World" only a few of the others (claimed by Stoddard to be racially inferior) should be allowed to live so that people like Stoddard would have some clear inferiors to be their servants. Even in Stoddard's White Man's World, only the Germans, Scandinavians, Brits and perhaps the Scots would be allowed to survive for, being in Stoddard's estimation, racially superior (all but the Scots would be thought of as entirely or partially Aryan).

You might claim that The Rising Tide of Color was only one book and not Sanger's book but Stoddard was her closest associate and later served as her "official" observer at the Nazi eugenics courts, writing breathless monthly reports back to the American Birth Control League Magazine about what a spiffy job Herr Hitler was doing cleaning up the gene pool of Germany.

Madison Grant, who created the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, wrote introductions to both of their books (and, I suspect, wrote a few book length embarassments of his own).

When World War II broke out, Sanger and her closest pals had to be purged because they had gushed so regularly in favor of Hitler's eugenic enthusiasms. Barry Goldwater's first wife, Peggy Goldwater, was one of those who carried out the purge. She remained on the Planned Parenthood Board of Directors until her own death in the mid-1970s. Sanger, not wanting to give up income from the racist and eugenicist suckers, then formed International Planned Parenthood as her new cash cow.

A lot of suffragettes would have had problems with eugenics much less pro-Nazi enthusiasms. While most were liberals, they were mostly not homicidal racists. Susan B. Anthony (the Founding Mother of feminism) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (another Founding Mother) were both absolutely opposed to abortion and published their views in the feminist magazines of their mid-19th to late 19th Century time. The suffragettes were not unaware of the writings of Anthony and Stanton as to the vicious exploitation and damaging of women, physically and emotionally, that resulted from abortion.

Another interesting (generally pro-Sanger and certainly pro-abortion) source of information on Sanger is her biographer, Phyllis Chesler, who wrote: Margaret Sanger, Woman of the Century. Chesler is a NYC feminist liberal, still alive and writing, who admires Sanger to some extent (Woman of the Century) but essentially admits that, if Sanger's lips moved, Sanger was lying. Like most biographers, Chesler tends to be an honest woman whatever her ideological deficiencies.

It is interesting that Sanger chose eugenics-obsessed people (many of them conservative in their politics for that time as she was to become) since she was Irish by birth, her maiden name being Higgins (I say this as one who is partly Irish Catholic). We Irish can be verrrrry full of ourselves but we tend not to fantasize that the Ould Sod has produced the "superior race." We are not bad pugilists, have many funny stories to tell and are immeasurably good-looking of course, but God did create booze to see to it that we would not be allowed to rule the worlds by use of our clever tongues. Also, she was the youngest of about 12 children. Her mother was very Catholic. Her father was an atheist who beat her mother on numerous occasions for even suggesting that the children be baptized at all much less Catholic. Margaret had herself baptized Catholic by a White Plains, NY, priest when she was about fourteen and left the Church a year later (no explanation for either event has ever been recorded by any author I have found to date).

In the first decade of the 20th Century, Margaret Higgins Sanger was married to an architect by the name of William Sanger whom she roped into various leftist causes and required him to participate in endless meetings.

She started off advocating abortion. She fled to Europe one step ahead of the NYC cops (barely escaping a well-deserved extended stay in the taxpayers' hotel or hoosegow) after advocating abortion publicly in violation of laws at the time. There, in England, she became the mistress of Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells among other "progressive" thinkers. Ellis advised her to stop advocating abortion (too radical to be a first step) and to advocate instead that people "plan" their families (limit the number of their children, divide the romantic from the procreative purposes of marriage, facilitate [by implication] "free love" to which Sanger was also obviously dedicated, undermine the Judaeo-Christian basis of Western Civilization and free the elites from any restraint of law or custom).

Just why she imagined herself an elitist is a mystery but onetime Planned Barrenhood Executive Director Faye Wattleton also operated under the notion that she was among the ubermenschen which is not a common pretense among most African-Americans. Drop-dead good looking and brilliant, perhaps. Ubermenschen, reallllly! If the Irish are not ubermenschen, then neither is she.

Finally, for now, BTW, eugenics was very popular in self-supposed elitist circles when Margaret was born. Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most execrable scum ever to sit on SCOTUS had been wounded in the Civil War and was still roaring along in the 1920s successfully engineering through SCOTUS decisions the gummint sterilization, without the victims' knowledge, of several young people in mountain areas of the South, supposed by Holmes and his ilk to be retarded (apparently they had graduated neither Harvard nor Harvard Law) on the infamous basis of his ignorant speculation (right there in his opinion) that "three generations of imbeciles is enough."

I would close by saying to you that, if you read Margaret Sanger's own books, Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color and the Chesler biography of Sanger, feel free to ignore anything that I or any prolifer may have to say about her and judge her on those sources alone and I trust that I will not be disappointed at the result when they have converted you to be her enemy whatever your own ideology so long as you are a decent human being which I trust you are.

59 posted on 05/17/2005 1:41:58 PM PDT by BlackElk (Dean of Discipline of the Tomas de Torquemada Gentlemen's Club)
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To: Corin Stormhands

LOL!


60 posted on 05/17/2005 3:08:15 PM PDT by SIDENET (Yankee Air Pirate)
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